#ethan herisse

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Nickel Boys (2024), dir. RaMell Ross

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Stills from Nickel Boys Directed by RaMell Ross

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nickel boys, 2024 (dir. ramell ross)

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Nickel Boys | Official Trailer

Two young men (Ethan Herisse as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner) navigate the harrowing trials of reform school in Florida. The film is based on The Nickel Boys, a 2019 novel by novelist Colson Whitehead.

From Academy Award Nominee RaMell Ross comes “A New American Masterpiece”. See the film only in theaters this fall.

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Nickel Boys

directed by RaMell Ross, 2024

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Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson of Nickel Boys for the Los Angeles Times

Set in the 1960s, “Nickel Boys” is based on the real-life events of Dozier School, a Florida reform school called Nickel Academy in the book. An investigation uncovered torture and abuse that led to the deaths of about 100 boys, many buried in unmarked graves. Herisse plays Elwood, [a college-bound teenager raised by his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor)]. When he unknowingly gets in a stolen car, the driver is arrested and Elwood is sent to Nickel. There he befriends the gregarious Turner, played by Wilson. A poetic study in identity, the first half of the film is shot from Elwood’s point of view. We catch glimpses of his reflection in windows but never really see him until he arrives at Nickel and meets Turner, to whom the POV suddenly switches. It’s only when he is recognized by a peer that the audience sees Elwood. (x)

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Great Books Don’t Make Great Films, but “Nickel Boys” Is a Glorious Exception

RaMell Ross’s first dramatic feature, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel, gives the bearing of witness an arresting cinematic form.

By Richard Brody December 6, 2024

It’s harder to adapt a great book than an average one. Literary greatness often inhibits directors, who end up paying prudent homage to the source rather than engaging in the bold revisions that successful adaptations require. And even uninhibited directors may lack the stylistic originality of their literary heroes. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that the director RaMell Ross, in his first dramatic feature, “Nickel Boys”—adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel, “The Nickel Boys”—avoids both obstacles with a rare blend of daring and ingenuity. Few films have ever rendered a major work of fiction so innovatively yet so faithfully. In a year of audaciously accomplished movies, “Nickel Boys” stands out as different in kind. Ross, who co-wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes, achieves an advance in narrative form, one that singularly befits the movie’s subject—not just dramatically but historically and morally, too.

The movie’s title refers to Black youths (teens and younger) who are inmates of the Nickel Academy, a segregated and abusive “reform school” in rural northern Florida—particularly to two teen-agers, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who become friends while incarcerated there, in the mid-nineteen-sixties. (The institution in Whitehead’s novel is inspired by the notorious Dozier School for Boys, but his characters are fictional.) Elwood, who is sixteen years old when he enters the facility, is being raised by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who works on the cleaning staff of a hotel. He’s a star student, literary and politically passionate, in a segregated school. One of his teachers, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), is a civil-rights activist, and he plays a Martin Luther King, Jr., speech on a record for his students. Elwood gets his picture in a local newspaper for participating in a civil-rights demonstration, but he’s only holding a sign; he longs to join in civil disobedience, but Hattie seems skeptical about the idea. Hitchhiking to a nearby college for advanced classes, he gets a ride from a flashily dressed, fast-talking Black man (Taraja Ramsess) whose car, unbeknownst to Elwood, is stolen. When the police pull the driver over, the innocent Elwood, too, is punished, resulting in his internment in Nickel.

From the start, Ross throws down a stylistic gauntlet: up until Elwood’s imprisonment, the action is seen entirely from his point of view—literally so, as if the camera were in the place occupied by his head, pivoting and tilting to show his shifting gaze, while his voice is heard offscreen. This device was famously used by Robert Montgomery in his 1947 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “The Lady in the Lake,” but it was no more than a gimmick. In Ross’s hands, the device becomes something overwhelmingly expressive: the images, rather than merely recording Elwood’s emotions, register the cause of those emotions and allow the viewer to partake in his inner world.

The results can be puckish, as when Elwood’s reflection appears in the chrome side of the iron that Hattie is sliding across an ironing board. But Ross’s technique is exquisitely responsive to the story’s depth and range of experience. The viewer shares Elwood’s naïve bewilderment when the driver of the stolen car, hearing a police siren, tells him not to turn around; similarly, one feels the anguished anticipation when Elwood awaits transport to Nickel. At this point, an extraordinary scene tears a hole in time, bringing the history of Black American life rushing in to overtake Elwood’s own: Hattie, with an air of unusual formality and seething indignation, recalls in excruciating detail her father’s death in police custody and her husband’s death at the hands of white assailants. But she expects better for Elwood.

Once the police have deposited Elwood in Nickel’s run-down barracks for Black inmates, Ross extends the dramatic force of his method while expanding its intellectual scope. At breakfast, Elwood meets Turner, who’s from Houston and much more streetwise. The impact of this moment is heralded in a coup de cinéma that is a vast amplification of the story: a repetition of the breakfast-table encounter, seen, the second time around, from Turner’s point of view. Once the pair become friends, both of their perspectives share the film, to mighty effect.

Elwood’s wrongful detention is only the first of the Job-like litany of injustices heaped upon him. In Nickel, sucker-punched and knocked out by a bigger kid, Elwood receives the same standard and brutal punishment as his assailant. Nickel’s sadistic supervisor, Mr. Spencer (Hamish Linklater), who is white, administers beatings with a strap in the so-called white house, far from the barracks. An industrial fan is used to drown out the victims’ screams, but it doesn’t quite do so, and Elwood, with his view of the horrors obstructed, hears them in terror while awaiting his turn.

Hospitalized as a result of the beating, Elwood gets a surprise visit from Turner, who’s also a patient (having skillfully feigned illness). Turner warns him that there are still worse punishments menacing the Nickel inmates, ranging from the sweat box—a brutally hot crawl space under a tar roof—to actual murder. (Such deaths were covered up by burial in unmarked graves and an official lie that the child ran away without a trace.) Elwood, inspired by the civil-rights movement and knowing that his grandmother has hired a lawyer, is confident that justice will prevail. He even keeps a notebook in which he records unpaid labor and which he thinks will help get Nickel shut down. Turner has no such confidence, insisting that no one gets out of Nickel alive except by getting himself out. The two teens’ visual perspectives, alternating through the hospital scene, embody their diametrically opposed views of American society, of their prospects, and of the destinies that await them.

Through Elwood’s and Turner’s eyes, in scenes that unfold in long and complex takes, the movie offers a formidable fullness of incident, intimately physical detail, and finely nuanced observations. The corruption of Nickel’s administrators and the legitimized absurdities of their cruel regime come to light as they’re experienced by the two teens, as do Hattie’s struggles to stay connected with Elwood and to seek legal relief. Lyrical snatches of daily life—passing moments of grace on a job outside Nickel’s grounds or during free moments in a rec room—are haunted by traces of past brutality and flickers of menace. Ross stages the action with a choreographic virtuosity that’s all the more astonishing given that this is his first dramatic film. (His previous feature, from 2018, is the documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.”) His teeming visual imagination is matched by the agile physicality of Jomo Fray’s cinematography. As a first dramatic feature, “Nickel Boys” is in the exalted company of such films as Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust.” Like them, it comprehensively creates a new way of capturing immediate experience cinematically, a new aesthetic for dramatizing history and memory.

Early on, the action is set in historical perspective by means of flash-forwards. Eventually, there are revelations about the atrocities at Nickel; the grounds are excavated, and human remains discovered. One of the friends (played as an adult by Daveed Diggs) gets wind of these investigations, having in the intervening years made his way to New York, found employment as a mover, and started his own business. In this later time frame, Ross continues to rely on point-of-view images, but with a piercing difference. The camera now floats just behind the character’s head, depicting work and home, love stories and painful reunions, fleeting observations and a reckoning with the past, as if from two points of view simultaneously—one visual and one spectral, bringing absence to life along with presence.

The onscreen incarnation of Elwood’s and Turner’s perceptions isn’t only intellectual or theoretical. The moral essence of Ross’s technique is to give cinematic form to the bearing of witness. Where Whitehead’s novel describes his characters’ physical torments in the third person, with psychological discernment and declarative precision, Ross’s movie fuses observation and sensation with its audiovisual style. It suggests a form of testimony beyond language, outside the reach of law and outside the historical record. It is a revelation of inner experience that starts with the body and all too often remains sealed off there and lost to time—except to the extent that the piece of art can conjure it into existence.

The movie’s twin aspects of witness and of point of view have a significance that extends beyond the drama and into cinematic history. There were no Black directors in Hollywood until the late sixties, and no Hollywood films that conveyed then what “Nickel Boys” shows in retrospect: the monstrous abuses of the Jim Crow era and its vestiges. In bringing the historical reckonings of Whitehead’s novel to the screen, Ross hints at an entire history of cinema that doesn’t exist—a bearing of witness that didn’t happen and the lives that were lost in that invisible silence. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 16, 2024, issue, with the headline “Each Other’s Back.”

Directed by: RaMell Ross Screenplay by RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes Based onThe Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead Produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, David Levine, Joslyn Barnes Starring: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Cinematography: Jomo Fray Edited by Nicholas Monsour Music by Alex Somers and Scott Alario Production: Orion Pictures, Plan B Entertainment, Louverture Films, Anonymous Content Distributed by Amazon MGM Studios Release Dates: August 30, 2024 (Telluride) December 13, 2024 (United States) Running time140 minutes Country: United States Language: English

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Ethan Herisse | Louis Vuitton ensemble | Front Row Fashion: Paris | 2025

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Nickel Boys (2024) Review

The friendship between Elwood and Turner as they help each other survive in a reform school in Florida, which was known for abusive treatment of the students. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Continue reading Nickel Boys (2024) Review

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2024 Telluride Film Festival Capsule Reviews: 'Conclave,' Nickel Boys,' 'Maria'

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L’apprezzata opera prima di RaMell Ross, Nickel Boys , che mostra il passato razzista degli Stati Uniti da una nuova prospettiva (inedita per un adattamento perché abbandona lo schema della voce fuori campo), ha meritatamente conquistato 2 nominations all’Oscar tra cui Miglior sceneggiatura non originale e Miglior film

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Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Ethan Herisse, and Brandon Wilson at the 82nd Golden Globes Awards

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Nickel Boys (2024)

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Watched Nickel Boys. Spoilers below. Watch this movie.

Extremely rare occasion where I think I may have preferred this at home to the theater. In part this is for some unfortunate practical reasons: the speakers were not high quality enough to carry the intentionally fuzzy sound and still make everything properly comprehensible, there was an incessantly whispering couple right next to me, the seats were notably less comfortable than I was used to. But this acute sense of the issues with my own environment correspond not only to myself, but the conversation the movie has with its viewers: I felt a deep voyeuristic desire to totally participate in the first-person, to connect perfectly with someone who has lived a life different from my own, and the perspective and utterly personal, utterly intimate style seemed to be, in an act of extraordinary kindness, inviting me to do as much. But, this is impossible. In many ways this movie feels to me an exploration of the boundaries of the medium, which are artificial and which are necessary, and while it is able to shatter those distances that are bridgeable, it makes clear that some are not. I am not Elwood. I am not Turner. I am not imprisoned, I am not Black, I am not dead. The camera leaves the first person perspective almost exclusively to show us Turner after Elwood dies. Even after becoming an Elwood Curtis, he is, like the audience, not his Elwood Curtis. We cannot see out of his eyes, because he is not seeing out of his own; he has ceded his perspective to another, donated his experience, in another act of total kindness, to the one who was left behind.

How long? Not long

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'Nickel Boys' Lets You in on the Action

'Nickel Boys' Lets You in on the Action

If I had a Nickel for every Boy… (CREDIT: Courtesy of Orion Pictures)© 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved. Starring: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs Director: RaMell Ross Running Time: 140 Minutes Rating: PG-13 for Racism and Authoritarianism Release Date: December 13, 2024 (New York Theaters)/December 20,…

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Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, photographed by Misan Harriman (x)