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Nickel Boys is the second film by American filmmaker, photographer, and scholar RaMell Ross, whose earlier film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was released in 2018 and received a nomination for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards. Nickel Boys is Ross’s first feature-length fictional work, and it showcases the same inventiveness that critics applauded in his documentary work. Where Hale County This Morning, This Evening presents a nonlinear, impressionistic portrait of life in present-day Hale County, Alabama–part of the regional “Black Belt”–Nickel Boys is no less ambitious. Notably, almost all of Nickel Boys is shot from a first-person perspective, alternating between the perspective of the idealistic Elwood and the more world-weary Turner, two students at a segregated reform school Nickel Academy in the Florida Panhandle. Both films use novel cinematic techniques to depict Black communities in the American South in ways that depart radically from an “anthropological” gaze that examines Black people as passive objects of study.   

The screenplay, co-written by Ross and film producer Joslyn Barnes, is adapted from an earlier novel of a similar name: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. Published in 2019, Whitehead’s novel received a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the second of Whitehead’s novels, after The Underground Railroad, to receive the prize. In The Underground Railroad, Whitehead presents an at times surreal alternative history, in which the “Underground Railroad”–the network of routes and safehouses used by enslaved Africans and Black Americans to escape to the abolitionist north–is reimagined as an actual rail transport system. In The Nickel Boys, however, Whitehead eschewed the more fantastic or surreal elements of his earlier work in order to lend the story of Elwood and Turner a greater sense of realism.  

Both film and novel are highly grounded in history, despite featuring fictional characters and stories. “Nickel Academy” is a fictionalized version of a real reform school located in Marianna, Florida: the Florida School for Boys, also referred to as the Dozier School for Boys. Operating from 1900 to 2011, the school was, at one point, the largest juvenile reform institution in the entire nation despite its local reputation for violent beatings, sexual abuse, and even deaths of students, most of whom were Black. In 2010, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement began a series of investigations that would lead to the closure of the school. Further investigations by researchers at the University of South Florida led to the discovery a significant number of unmarked graves on the campus, supporting former students’ claims that their schoolmates had been murdered by members of the staff. 

Using innovative camera techniques to film from the perspective of the protagonists Elwood and Turner, Nickel Boys was shot in Louisiana between October and December 2022. First shown at the 51st Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2024, the film was distributed by Amazon MGM studios to a limited box-office release, expanded to 240 theaters across the United States for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and a four-day weekend. It was a modest success in the box office but received high praise from critics, who celebrated its novel cinematography and noted the political importance of its story. The decision to film Nickel Boys in the first person received particular attention from critics. While a small number of critics found this decision distracting, most praised Ross for his inventive and immersive approach to filming the everyday violence and racism of the Jim Crow Era South. 

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