There are films that move you, and then there are films that leave ash on your tongue. Nickel Boys is the latter. RaMell Ross doesn’t so much tell a story as he unearths a burial site, forcing you to reckon with the bones. This is not an easy film, nor is it meant to be. It is not built for comfort. It is built for confrontation. It leaves no space for nostalgia, no room for the convenient lie that history is just a collection of dates and old photographs. No, history is alive. It breathes through the cracks in the pavement, it whispers through prison bars, it lingers in the bodies of the people who suffered so the rest of us could forget. And Nickel Boys is a painful reminder of that unfinished history.
Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) is the kind of kid America promises will make it. Smart, ambitious, armed with the words of Dr. King and a faith in justice that borders on reckless. He’s been taught that history bends toward the good, that righteousness is a currency that will pay out in time. But America is not a bank, and belief in the system will not save him. One mistake—one ride in the wrong car, one moment where the world tilts just enough—lands him in the Nickel Academy, where cruelty is an institution as old as the bricks in the walls. There, he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), a boy who has no use for Dr. King’s speeches, who has already learned that survival is about knowing when to duck, when to run, when to keep your mouth shut.
Nickel Academy does not care for lessons of progress; it is an ecosystem of pain, built to remind these boys that they were never meant to have a future. Superintendent Spencer (Hamish Linklater) presides over this kingdom of suffering like a man convinced he’s doing God’s work, while outside the gates, Elwood’s grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) prays for a salvation that likely isn’t coming.
It moves through time like a bruise spreading beneath the skin.
But Nickel Boys is not a film about survival in the way Hollywood usually packages it. There are no inspiring montages, no grand moments of defiance scored by a swelling orchestra. RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes construct a film that denies trifling catharsis. Ross, known for his poetic and impressionistic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, brings that same visual language here. His use of first-person POV places us inside Elwood’s mind at key moments, not as a gimmick, but as a demand: feel this. On the other hand, the score by Alex Somers and Scott Alario doesn’t tell you what to feel—it lingers like a memory you thought forgotten, or an echo of something terrible that happened long before you were born but still, somehow, belongs to you.
The film stays largely faithful to Colson Whitehead’s novel, but it also understands that adaptation is not imitation. It moves through time like a bruise spreading beneath the skin, capturing not just the brutality of the past, but the way its effects ripple forward, into the bones of the present.
So does it work? Yes. Mostly. The film is devastating, beautifully acted, and refuses to let you off the hook. But its greatest strength—its quiet, its restraint, its refusal to package trauma in a way that is easily consumed—is also what will make it divisive. This is not a film that will hold your hand, and for some, that distance might be frustrating.
The first-person sequences are arresting, but…
The pacing is deliberate (slow, if you’re the impatient type), and there are moments where I wished Ross had let the emotions breathe just a bit longer, had given us more space to sit in the tension before cutting away. Turner, in particular, could have been explored beyond his function as the counterpoint to Elwood’s doomed idealism. And while the first-person sequences are arresting, there are times when they feel almost too experimental, like they belong in another version of this film, one that leans even further into Ross’s documentarian instincts.
But what sticks to you long after the credits roll is the weight of history pressing down. Nickel Boys does not ask for your sympathy. It does not beg you to care. It’s more simply a quiet, searing indictment of the systems that have always been in place, the ones that never really went away. If you’re looking for a film that will tie things up neatly, that will leave you with the feeling that justice, eventually, prevails—this is not that film. But if you are looking for truth, raw and unflinching, then Nickel Boys delivers. It’s not perfect, sure. But history never is.
