POV: You're Black in a Jim Crow Era Reform School

Nickel Boys is a painful, unenjoyable, important watch. It will not fill you with hope. It will not make you laugh. It made a few people in the theatre's predominantly white audience cry. It is brutal. It's about trauma, racism and institutional abuse, and how difficult it is to cope with traumatic memories. These themes make Nickel Boys a tough movie to talk about, although there's a lot to discuss.

The one thing you might already know about Nickel Boys is that it's shot entirely in a first-person point of view. This stylistic choice will put a few people off. It did not bother me too much, but there were times where it felt like I was watching a video game; I kept waiting for my response options to pop up. I won't say this style choice is groundbreaking, as it was done in Enter the Void and Hardcore Henry. However, I think there was a symbolic purpose behind this choice.

Director RaMell Ross's choice to shoot Nickel Boys in POV lets the audience see what our protagonists, Elwood and Turner, see as they try to survive a Florida reform school in 1962. Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. While there, he has unsurprisingly horrible experiences. In flashforward scenes, the camera moves from Elwood's POV to being set on his shoulders. To me, this symbolized how the horrors he experienced at Nickel stayed with him, becoming the weight on his shoulders that he can't shake off. In one of these scenes, Elwood meets Chickie Pete, another former student. Chickie Pete's monologue informs the audience of the posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by the Nickel boys. They have difficulty sleeping in the dark, forming relationships, keeping jobs, avoiding drugs and remembering what happened at Nickel. Their selective memory makes Ross's POV choice even more essential because, if the boys from Nickel cannot remember the trauma, then we must go back and live vicariously through them to fully understand the depth of their experiences.

My favourite part of the movie was the performance by Brandon Wilson. He plays Turner, the best friend of Elwood. The reason Wilson is intriguing has to do with the character he portrays. Elwood doesn't hide his disdain — he is angry at the system, but hopes that his people outside of the reform school can help him fix it. Turner holds his disdain behind a veil of relaxed nonchalance. His performance reminded me of Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. Behind Turner's cool veil, we see the anger and fear burning in his soul.

Nickel Boys is Ross's first narrative feature film. What impressed me most about his filmmaking style was his use of symbolic visual rhetoric. Through a mix of fantasy, found footage and experimental film, Ross symbolically portrays the Jim Crow era, and the deep roots of racism and slavery in the United States. For example, there's a shot of a mule in the halls of Nickel. This reminded me of the broken promise made by the Union during the Civil War that emancipated slaves would receive 40 acres and a mule.

Ross also frequently uses hanging imagery in Nickel Boys. There's a scene where Turner and Elwood discover a metal apparatus attached to a tree that was once used for lynchings. The tree has grown around the apparatus, ingraining the metal within its bark, illustrating the deep-seated roots of lynchings in America. The director also includes found footage that has the subtext of lynchings. This imagery was effective in reminding the audience of the shared, violent history of the U.S., even if direct lynchings do not play a central role in the movie's story.

There are other images in Nickel Boys that I'm still puzzling over. Ross makes a connection between the boys at Nickel and the Space Race by including multiple shots of the moon and rockets in space. This reminds me of the Gil Scot-Heron poem/song, "Whitey on the Moon." This song compares the struggles faced by impoverished Americans in the 1960s, such as the unaffordability of health care, with white America's exorbitant spending on vanity projects that made little difference to the social realities of their home country. However, I'm not positive that this was the parallelism Ross was going for by comparing the Nickel boys' experience with the Space Race.

The script continues the movie's symbolic themes. At one point, an old man says, in passing to Elwood, "Where will we rest?" This line is symbolic of the entire movie. How do these boys rest when they are scarred from what happened to them? As we find out from Chickie Pete's monologue, they don't.

As you can probably tell by what you've read so far, Nickel Boys is a heavy and dense movie. The story shines a light on a part of U.S. history that I was unfamiliar with. Nickel Academy is reminiscent, in a way, of the residential schools that we had here in Canada. If I were to think about where juveniles were sent for their detention during the Jim Crow era, especially in a state like Florida, I probably would have imagined something similar to what we see in Nickel Boys, which feels more like a plantation than a reform school.

America's history of racism is, unfortunately, a crucial part of the country's identity, right up there with free speech and gun rights. The country's dark legacy of slavery, segregation and minorities in poverty is unavoidable in the Western cultural diaspora. This legacy has informed Black American culture since its inception, finding modern footholds in mediums like rap music, literature and visual art. More recent Black-centric movies have begun dealing with this violent history in a more realistic way, rather than the highly entertaining but wildly romanticized blaxploitation movies of the 1960s and '70s.

Nickel Boys makes multiple references to Sidney Poitier, the actor who first broke down racial barriers in Hollywood. Prior to Poitier, Black Americans had horrible representation in Hollywood. This representation included white actors in black face and the "mammy" character — usually a large Black woman who would housekeep for a white family and was portrayed as loud, subservient and uneducated. There were no Black counterparts to heroes like John Wayne and Clark Gable, until Poitier broke the mold. One Poitier movie directly referenced in Nickel Boys is The Defiant Ones. The title alone is enough to summarize Elwood, whose defiant streak is his primary characteristic (along with his smarts).

Although Elwood and Turner's story is fictitious, it is based on shamefully real experiences. Nickel Academy was inspired by Dozier School of Boys, a Florida reform school where juveniles were sent for committing petty crimes. These real boys were victims of countless abuses including beatings, sexual assault and murder. To make it even worse, Dozier only closed down for good in 2011. Author Colson Whitehead adapted and fictionalized the Dozier school for his 2020 novel, The Nickel Boys, which this movie is based on. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

I often walk out of the cinema and wonder if I would recommend the movie I just watched to a friend. Although I thought Nickel Boys was a strong movie, I find it difficult to recommend. Certainly, now is the time to see it, as it is nominated for Best Picture. I would gain more out of it with subsequent rewatches, but I don't think that I would revisit it again. It was informative, but it wasn't outright entertaining. It felt like a movie made for university classes — to be studied, but not enjoyed. Although I'd never seen a movie about the Black experience in U.S. reform schools, it still falls under the theme of American racism during the 20th century, which a plethora of other movies have covered — especially the filmography of Poitier.

Nickel Boys is sure to rock you. If you care deeply about social justice and if you want to know about every facet of American racism, then absolutely watch Nickel Boys. If you want to know what a movie shot entirely in first-person POV looks like, watch Nickel Boys. If you love symbolic visual rhetoric, watch Nickel Boys. If you're looking for an enjoyable art-house movie to watch on a Saturday night, I would pick something else.