FYC: Nickel Boys

the best movie of 2024

A few weeks ago, I surprised my friends with a zine about my favorite movies of 2024. For the past five years, I’ve been writing and mailing out a zine about my favorite albums. It began as a way of releasing myself from the algorithm and connecting to people through physical media.

Writing about movies and sending it to people who were already interested in what I had to say gave me the freedom and confidence to complete the project. But I have long wasted this digital space and figured it could be an extension of my zine, potentially a way to find more readers who would want a future zine or just generally.

I may not post everything I wrote in the zine, or I may add or alter what I initially shared there, but I felt compelled to start with Nickel Boys, my favorite movie of 2024.

As the Oscar race heats up, with controversies halting some campaigns (please, let’s not award Emilia Pérez) and late successes fueling others (I’m more than fine with an Anora run), I’ve been disappointed that no attention seems to have shifted to Nickel Boys. As you’ll see in my review below, I really do think it’s a special movie that has never been made before, at least not quite like this.

Nickel Boys

dir. RaMell Ross

I try not to exaggerate movies with superlatives or too many adjectives, but I feel confident in saying that Nickel Boys is already one of the great movies of the 21st century. Shot almost entirely through the POV of its main characters, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), the movie’s innovative filming technique makes the audience see through the eyes of two young Black boys as they endure the abuses of a “reform” academy in the 1960s. Cowritten with Joslyn Barnes and based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, which is based on a real place where heinous acts of anti-Black violence occurred, director RaMell Ross makes a wholly original version of an all-too-familiar story.

Nickel Boys begins with flashes of childhood memories, the kind of impressionistic images that stay with us throughout our lifetimes: laying in the grass, watching adults in their element at a house party, a Christmas tree, a passing look from your grandmother.

The sounds are just as important, the way words can be muffled by time or sticking to us although only heard from a distance. Some of these moments are universal; others, only lived by people whose realities are mediated by a white gaze. Elwood’s bare stomach is poked by a white man’s cane on the street. When he is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, he sees an extension of that moment in every moment that follows.

Although the audience watches this film from the perspective of its two main characters, Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray create a necessary tension between the camera, the subject, the viewer, and the differences between our lived experiences. Everyone will see the same movie, but we will all see it differently, because each of us is always bringing our own perspectives to everything, whether we are always aware of this friction or not.

One of the key ways that Nickel Boys accomplishes this play between camera and viewer is in flash-forwards that see Ellwood uncovering the violent acts carried out at Nickel Academy. Though a portion of the POV shot remains, the camera is now viewing Elwood from a distance of about two feet behind him. Life has hardened something in him and perhaps removed our ability to fully access his trauma, or he is maybe always watching himself from a distance since his own traumas separated himself from who he was before. One such scene in a bar left a lump in my throat. A man was still the boy he’d always been, and no time had passed between then and now.

As the narrative unfolds, we flip between Elwood and Turner, seeing and affirming their existence to one another in the face of the traumatic events at Nickel. Alongside them, there are moments that require reorienting to what is onscreen: clips from The Defiant Ones, Martin Luther King Jr. speaking, men landing on the moon, King’s funeral. There’s a suggestion that while everyone was experiencing the same events of the 1960s, there were radically different ways of viewing them. Some people were going to space, while some boys were having their lives cut short by the endurance and maintenance of American slavery. And yet, there are moments of Black flight, too, from a Santa surfing to kids doing flips in their yards. It’s your choice which images you hold onto, and which ones you feel accountable to, after spending a few hours seeing through someone else’s eyes.