OTwo Reviews: Nickel Boys

Image Credit: Orion Pictures

Head of Reviews Robert Flynn discusses the cinematic experimentation in Nickel Boys, and how it has become one of the most profound films to be released in years

Alfred Hitchcock once warned Peter Bogdanovich to never use an establishing shot while creating a film. The blatantly expository and flippant nature of the establishing shot went against everything that one of the great visual storytellers stood for: approaching a story purely through visual craft. Through the repeated use of GoPros, as well as the continued misuse of the term “POV” that has been widespread across social media, the point of view, or POV, shot has also become an incredibly hollow and tacky form of visual storytelling. 

Nickel Boys (2024) challenges this notion with an entirely new and breathtaking cinematic vision. Director RaMell Ross’s film has gone beyond using the POV as a cinematic tool and instead uses it as a way to emphasise perspective. A perspective that has been lost and forced into the outer reaches of America’s collective memory.

These identities are unique and are the result of so much beauty and love, though, one person contains multitudes. Their identities are also built of necessary sensibilities that help them to survive and counteract prejudice.

Ross’s film is presented through the point of view of two black teenage boys in 1960s Florida, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). They forge a close bond out of necessity; they become friends after being sent to Nickel Academy, a reform school that resembles a prison with its uniforms and barbed wire fences. The academy is racially segregated and harbours an especially vitriolic and often violent attitude toward its African American attendees. The perspective frequently shifts between Elwood, the newcomer and optimistic one, and Turner, the more hardened of the two, as they grow together and try to survive the threats that Nickel poses to them, especially as the stakes increasingly drift into murderous territory. 

While the setting of the film certainly matters, the use of POV almost proves more imperative throughout the loose narrative. Every frame is understood as the perspective of either Elwood or Turner, therefore, there feels as though there is an innate intentionality imbued across each moment. The grimaces from older white men, Elwood tracing his arm with his eyes as a young man, or the shoes that a middle aged black man wears. All of these details come into question: why are we seeing this, why are we being perceived this way? Contextualised within Elwood and Turner’s perspective, we are made to witness the formation of an identity between each of these intimate interactions and observations. These identities are unique and are the result of so much beauty and love, though, one person contains multitudes. Their identities are also built of necessary sensibilities that help them to survive and counteract prejudice.

RaMell Ross’s vision proves to be a profound sensory experience that exhibits one of the richest and most exciting realisations of cinematic experimentation in contemporary filmmaking.

Elwood and Turner’s perspectives are representative of the African American experience, though, within the wider thematic concerns of Nickel Boys, they also represent perspectives that have been written out of American history. In an early scene, Elwood’s outspoken High School teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails) passes out black markers to each of his students in his exclusively African American class. He does this to dispel the lies that American history has reinforced about black people, to deconstruct the socially-imposed prisons that black people are forced to operate within that have been supported by racist misrepresentations for centuries. Before being unlawfully sent to Nickel Academy, Mr. Hill urges Elwood to go to a new local college near Tallahassee. There, Mr. Hill tells him to imagine history books that won’t necessitate the ink of his black marker.


The importance of storytelling and the power of memory are all realised in Ross’s groundbreaking use of POV. Each move is so measured and the subsequent effect feels astonishingly palpable and real. Through this vision, Nickel Boys goes beyond the usual conventions of cinema so that it can achieve a much greater cinematic experience: Nickel Boys doesn’t suspend disbelief, rather, it often feels like reality itself. In the same way this film refuses to tell a story in a conventional manner, it is a film that deconstructs the history of storytelling itself, projecting the life of someone who was made to feel as though they should be forgotten. RaMell Ross’s vision proves to be a profound sensory experience that exhibits one of the richest and most exciting realisations of cinematic experimentation in contemporary filmmaking.