Photo by Amazon MGM Studios – © Amazon MGM Studios 2024
Hearing the Oscar buzz for a new film every time it premieres in Venice or Telluride or Toronto is an exciting part of the fall season, and then getting our first glimpse when it releases a trailer for us a few days later.
The process that’s always exciting has just happened to RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, which immediately became a conversation starter when it premiered at Telluride earlier this week.
Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel of the same name, Nickel Boys “chronicles the powerful friendship between two young Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida,” per the film’s official logline.
Although Nickel Boys Academy is a work of fiction, the story is derived from the gruesome abuse suffered by Black students at the Dozier School For Boys, a real institution that operated during the 1950s and 1960s in Florida during the height of the Jim Crow era in the south.
Starring Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (who turns in what Tomris Laffly calls “a truly stunning performance” in her review of the film for The A.V. Club), Nickel Boys is a narrative film seen through a documentarian’s eye. Known for his Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross takes on a similar project in Nickel Boys, which uses first-person close-ups and long takes to alternate between the POVs of its central characters.
