I haven’t spoken at great length or written about RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys since seeing it at the Telluride Film Festival. It’s a very audacious and well executed feature debut from Ross who previously specialized in documentary filmmaking (Hale County This Morning, This Evening). I admire and respect everything about the film even if the choice of filming most of the narrative through first-person camerawork made me physically ill (I suffer from motion sickness — I threw up at The Blair Witch Project).
But no one else seemed to have that issue, and you should absolutely see this beautiful film when it opens in select theaters on October 25.
Here’s the official trailer of Amazon / MGM / Orion’s Nickel Boys plus detail and a poster following.
Directed by: RaMell Ross
Screenplay by: RaMell Ross & Joslyn Barnes
Based on the book “The Nickel Boys” by: Colson Whitehead
Produced by: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, David Levine, Joslyn Barnes
Executive Producers: Brad Pitt, Gabby Shepard, Emily Wolfe, Kenneth Yu, Chadwick Prichard
Music by: Alex Somers & Scott Alario
Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
Synopsis:
Elwood Curtis’s college dream shatters alongside a two-lane Florida highway. Bearing the brunt of an innocent misstep, he’s sentenced to the netherworld of Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory sunk deep in the Jim Crow South. He encounters another ward, the seen-it-all Turner. The two Black teens strike up an alliance: Turner dispensing fundamental tips for survival, Elwood, clinging to his optimistic worldview. Backdropped by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Elwood and Turner’s existence appear worlds away from Rev. Martin Luther King’s burnished oratory. Despite Nickel’s brutality, Elwood strives to hold onto his humanity, awakening a new vision for Turner.
