150 Word Review: 'Nickel Boys' (2024)

Heartbreak hotel

Photo: MGM Studios

I was unnerved by Nickel Boys—unnerved and moved, and at times, I felt like I was floating in someone else's dream. Nickel Boys is about the weight of history, and sorrow, and forgiveness. Director RaMell Ross's experimental adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer prize-winning novel flows like a memory, slowly, swiftly, then slowly again. He uses multiple techniques to disorient and immerse the audience, including a first-person POV, which reminded me of a video game.

And like a memory, past and present bleed into one another. The story of young black men in the 1950s suffering abuse in a juvenile prison run by white men is an open wound that never heals.

Brandon Wilson is kind and heroic as Turner, the best friend of the main character Elwood, played with fierce intelligence by Ethan Herisse. There are times Nickel Boys feels like a horror movie: unspeakable acts of violence happen off-screen.

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