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Overview
Released in 2024, Nickel Boys is a historical drama directed by RaMell Ross and based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys
. Set in the Florida Panhandle in the early 1960s, the film follows Elwood, an academically gifted Black teenager who is charged as an accomplice to a crime that he did not commit. Elwood is sent to the Nickel Academy reform school, where he befriends the cynical Turner and witnesses widespread abuse, exploitation, and violence. Shot from a striking first-person perspective that alternates between the viewpoints of Elwood and Turner, the movie underscores the relationship between idealism and cynicism and highlights the structural nature and brutality of racism.
