Nickel Boys (2024) Review: RaMell Ross's POV Adaptation Is the Year's Most Formally Ambitious Film

This review reflects the author's personal opinion. Trumpwatcher is an independent film publication, not affiliated with any studio, streamer, or festival. We do not cover political content.

A working nickel boys review has to begin with the camera, because RaMell Ross's adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel is built on a formal decision that almost no other 2024 American film has the discipline to attempt: most of the running time is photographed from inside the heads of its two protagonists. Not metaphorically. Literally. The camera takes the eye position of Elwood and, later, Turner, and the audience sees the Florida reform-school world through their actual visual frame. The decision could have been a stunt. It is not. Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray make it the entire moral architecture of the film, and the film carries that architecture for two hours and twenty minutes without ever feeling like a formal exercise.

If you are deciding whether to give the film its hundred and forty minutes: yes, on the largest screen you can find, and in a theater that respects the silences. The POV form depends on the audience's eyes doing real work, and the work is harder on small screens with ambient distraction. Find the conditions the picture asks for.

What Nickel Boys gets right

Ross's deepest decision — the one that makes the film one of the most important American adaptations of the past decade — is to treat the first-person camera as a structural promise rather than a stylistic choice. Once the audience accepts the rule, every scene that would have been violent in a conventional adaptation becomes harder to watch because the audience cannot escape the frame the protagonist cannot escape. Ross does not film the worst things directly; he films their immediate before and immediate after, and the audience's imagination supplies the rest. The restraint is the argument. The argument is that a literary adaptation about institutional violence does not need to reproduce the violence to convey its weight.

The specifics

Jomo Fray's lensing alternates between two distinct registers: a soft, almost golden naturalism for the pre-Nickel scenes in Tallahassee, and a flatter, more documentary register inside the school grounds. The change is gradual rather than abrupt, and the audience reads it as the slow loss of the world Elwood has been promised. The most striking visual decision is the use of period archival footage — civil rights newsreels, NASA broadcasts — interpolated directly into the first-person grammar. The interpolation is not commentary. It is the literal content of Elwood's interior, the world he is trying to participate in while the institution he is inside refuses to let him.

Spoilers are confined to a clearly labeled section near the end. Read freely until you reach it.

Where the film loses ground

The screenplay's biggest challenge is that the first-person camera form, by its nature, makes the supporting characters harder to develop. Hamish Linklater's Spencer, the reform-school administrator who functions as the antagonist, is doing the work of a much more complex character than the form allows him to fully be; Fred Hechinger's Harper has the same issue in reverse, with a scene of complicity that the form makes harder to read than the novel does. Whether these are weaknesses or features depends on how strictly you read the first-person promise. Ross is clearly choosing the form over conventional supporting-character development. The choice is defensible. It is also a cost.

A second observation: the third-act time-jump structure — which I will not spoil — works on a first viewing but exposes itself slightly more on a rewatch. The structural ambition is real; the execution depends on the audience's first-viewing memory of certain visual cues, and the cues are slightly less seamlessly placed than the form requires. A second pass smooths the seams, but a first pass occasionally feels the engineering.

How this film sits in its genre

The clearest siblings are Ross's own documentary feature Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) for the methodology of attentive looking, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1978) for the way a Black American narrative can be carried by texture rather than plot, and Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013) for the way an adaptation of institutional violence can refuse spectacle without softening the argument. Ross is closer to Burnett than to McQueen in temperament — the film is quieter, more elliptical, more interested in what survives than in what destroys — but he extends McQueen's discipline about refusing to give the audience the easy emotional cathartic release.

Readers tracking serious adaptation craft should pair this with our Heat 1995 piece on a different kind of patient American craftsmanship, and our slow-burn craft guide covers the patience tradition Ross is extending into a wholly new form. The Conclave review works through a parallel commitment to staging dialogue over action.

Performances worth singling out

Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, as Elwood and Turner, give two of the most quietly disciplined lead performances of the year. The first-person form means that for most of the running time, the audience does not see their faces while they are speaking. The performances live in their voices, their hands, the way they shift weight, the rhythms of their breathing. Both actors had to internalize the form before they could play the characters inside it, and the result is acting that does not feel like acting at all. By the time the camera does cut to their faces — and the rare cuts are placed for maximum weight — the audience already knows them by every other available channel.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as Elwood's grandmother Hattie, gives the film's most conventionally moving performance and is in line for the awards conversation she has been quietly building toward for a decade. Her single scene of confronting Spencer at the school is shot in a sustained two-shot that breaks the first-person form, and the form-break is the entire point. The film lets the audience see her face directly because she is fighting for the right to be seen.

A quick note on craft

Editor Nicholas Monsour deserves the closing craft note for a working nickel boys review. The cutting between Elwood's POV and Turner's POV in the second act is the kind of structural editing that almost never appears in mainstream American cinema, because almost no mainstream American director would attempt it. Monsour handles the transitions with such fluency that the audience reads them as natural even when the form is doing something genuinely radical. The film is one of the rare adaptations where the editing room is doing the same intellectual work as the screenplay.

SPOILERS AHEAD — read only if you have watched the film

The third-act revelation — that the older "Elwood" we have been following in the contemporary timeline is, in fact, Turner, who has been carrying Elwood's name and Elwood's story for decades after Elwood was killed trying to expose the school — is the moment the formal architecture pays its full debt. The first-person camera has been the literal vehicle of the survivor's ongoing identification with the dead. Turner has been seeing through Elwood's eyes because, in a sense, he has had to in order to keep going. The form was not a stylistic choice. It was always the content.

This is the kind of structural payoff that justifies the entire formal experiment. The revelation lands not as a twist but as a recognition — the audience realizes that we have been doing what Turner has been doing, looking through eyes that are not our own to honor someone we cannot return. The film closes on a wide shot of Turner walking through contemporary Tallahassee, the first-person form finally released, and the release is mourning. Few American films from this decade will carry weight like this one a generation from now.

The verdict

Trumpwatcher Score: 4.7 / 5

Rating: 4.7/5

Watch it in a theater, ideally in a respectful room, and watch it twice. The formal architecture earns the second viewing the way few films do — the camera tells a different story once the audience knows the structural reveal. For a double feature, pair it with Burnett's Killer of Sheep for the textural tradition, McQueen's 12 Years a Slave for the contemporary lineage, or Ross's own Hale County for the documentary discipline that the fiction extends. Any of the three deepens the picture.

For more on the adaptation craft Ross is extending, this nickel boys review sits in our independent reviews archive; the methodology behind our 4.7 verdict is documented at how we score films.

This article is the author's independent critical opinion and does not constitute professional advice. Trumpwatcher is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any film studio, distributor, streaming service, festival, political party, or campaign. All trademarks, titles, and proper names referenced belong to their respective owners and are used for editorial identification only. We do not host, link to, or condone unauthorized copies of any film. Always watch films through official theatrical or licensed streaming channels.