The blistering drama showing the US’s racist past from a new, first-person perspective

The Oscar-tipped film by RaMell Ross adapts Colson Whitehead’s novel about two boys at an abusive “reform” school and shoots it from their point of view. The effect is profound.

There’s no film this year, perhaps no film this decade, that looks and feels like Nickel Boys. The innovative new film from director RaMell Ross is based on the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead about an abusive “reform” school for boys, and provides a revolutionary perspective on the US’s racist past (and how it always informs the present), during the era of Jim Crow. This is in part because it focuses on the human experience rather than oppressive systems and punishment, above all through its use of a first-person viewpoint. Ross drops us behind the eyes of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an idealistic young man living in Florida in the 1960s, a bright future ahead of him. That’s cut short when he’s wrongfully convicted of car theft and sent to Nickel Academy. The school is functionally a jail, based on a real institution in Florida known for the discovery of dozens of unmarked graves on its property.

At Nickel, Elwood meets another young man named Turner (Brandon Wilson), who has a more cynical outlook on the civil rights movement that is unfolding at the time of their imprisonment. Ross frequently switches perspectives, not just between first-person and third-person framing (where the camera is locked to behind the character’s head) but also between the viewpoints of Elwood and Turner, letting us see each character how their friend sees them and transforming our view of each in the process. Like the book, it also periodically checks in with an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) reckoning with what happened.

Ross says that the camerawork in Nickel Boys is designed to reflect how every human being is the centre of their own world, but also how they experience the world in a way that they haven’t yet processed. “It’s about giving the person – about giving Elwood – not the hindsight of ourselves, which is to look at things as if they’re meaningful, but just to look at things that will become meaningful,” he tells the BBC. “So the narrative will always be secondary to the experience of looking.”

The way in which Elwood and Turner’s individual experiences are presented through the cameras – which were operated by Ross himself as well as cinematographer Jomo Fray and another cameraman, Sam Ellison, so they could each take breaks – includes movement mimicking that of a person’s eyes; the characters voices’ come from off screen, and you see their hands and feet, and sometimes their faces if they look at a reflective surface. Sometimes you really feel the restriction of their point of view, such as when they are getting chased and can’t tell how far someone is behind them, or hear menacing noises around the corner in their racially segregated hometown.

In order to create that point of view, the practical requirements of shooting in first person were demanding, but also allowed for spontaneity. Ross and Fray did away with a lot of the traditional structuring and planning of shots, and things were adjusted depending on the scene.

Ross says that “the blocking became more gestural” – more about considering what the character would be looking at, and how to make it so that body parts showed up in frame correctly, than it was about about traditional orchestration of how and where actors moved. For the filming of some of these point-of-view shots, the actor for the character whose eyes we are looking through wasn’t even on set.

Nickel Boys isn’t the first film to use first-person cinematography, but it’s certainly the first mainstream film release to use it in such a profound way. In the past, it’s a technique which has mostly been reserved for gimmicky horrors or action films that are often emulating first-person shooter video games – take for example 2017 Korean film The Villainess, or the (awful) 2015 sci-fi thriller Hardcore Henry.

Nickel Boys goes in the opposite direction to these types of films – instead of using the first-person point of view in service of pumped-up sensationalism, Ross is looking to throw out traditional narrative form and create something much more impressionistic. It’s a striking choice, in particular, for a film based on a novel, when so often such adaptations rely on chunks of diaristic voiceover and rigid structure. Nickel Boys shows how offering a visual window into the things that a character pays attention to is as good as internal monologue in helping the audience to understand them.

To Ross, the choice to shoot a lot of the film from the first-person viewpoint seemed obvious. “Why can’t we get closer to our sensibility and subjectivity on screen,” he asks. In particular, he says, adopting the first person POV “seemed to me just to be an act that would be refreshing for black folks, to look up on the screen and see their hands are doing something in the world. For many years I’ve been like, ‘Why has no one ever made [a film like] this?'”

Ross acknowledges that he is hardly the first filmmaker to use first person – he cites Harmony Korine’s recent experimental action film Aggro Dr1ft (2023) – but it’s the context in which he uses it which sets him apart. His editing collapses scenes together into something resembling stream-of-consciousness, and this experiential viewpoint feels especially significant when applied to Nickel Boys’ subject matter: all too often, this era of American race relations and racism is depicted from the outside looking in.

“An original concept in the writing process was, ‘What happened if you give Elwood and Turner a camera to make their own Hale County, right?'” Ross says, referring to his acclaimed 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. That film, which made his name, was an extremely intimate, again impressionistic portrait of the black community in the Alabama town of Hale County, where Ross moved in 2009. “Cameras weren’t portable, obviously, they weren’t digital in the 50s, 60s and 70s,” Ross continues. “And so no one would ever be able to gather enough footage to make something as poetic and as observational as that.” With Nickel Boys, he and Fray wondered about “how what people understand to be the image of black people [would] have changed if in the 60s people had access to show their point of view”.

Ellen Jones, journalist and author of Screen Deep: How Film and TV can Solve Racism and Save the World, praises the groundbreaking effect of the film’s formal conceit. “What is so exciting and impressive about Ross’s use of the camera in Nickel Boys is that it demands we consider not just the story, but how the story is told,” she says. “The first-person position of the camera eliminates the voyeuristic distance from racist violence, which has been typical [in film], and inserts us in the subjectivity of the black characters. That fact that it feels immersive and never gimmicky is nothing short of miraculous.”

This first person perspective certainly makes it stand out from the many other films about the Jim Crow era: Jones points out how conventional dramas by white filmmakers, such as Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Mississippi Burning (1988), Green Book (2018) and Hidden Figures (2016), are designed to speak to a presumed white audience by focusing on sensationalised images of black people in pain.

Ross’s break from a tradition of narrative presentation connects back to an appropriately freeform personal essay he wrote for Film Quarterly titled Renew The Encounter. It speaks of decoupling an idea of “blackness” from a commodified, mainstream American sensibility. This aim is reflected in Nickel Boys – as is the expressed desire to “create the personal-poetic experience of blackness”. His films do this by taking minute everyday experience and expanding it into an entire visual world, aiming, as he puts it in Renew the Encounter, to “bring elation to the experience of blackness”. Doing this and being honest about history is a delicate balance, but Nickel Boys achieves it: the suffering of its protagonists is included as an honest reflection of their lives, but its presentation is not the film’s only goal.

The first-person perspective also naturally puts certain limits on what the camera is showing. Some things are missed purely because the eye can only see so much. Others are excluded because the character simply doesn’t want to look, such as in one harrowing scene of corporal punishment in which Elwood avoids seeing what is happening to him, the camera’s gaze moving to the ground.  As such, acts of physical violence often happen in the periphery of the frame – as Ross puts it, Elwood isn’t there collecting evidence. “No one’s in the world to show black suffering at the time in which black suffering is happening,” Ross says, elaborating on his choice. “That’s not the purpose of them being human in the world – it’s just happening because of the larger context.”

Looking back at the basis of Hale County, Ross’s manifesto for that film (as shared in Filmmaker Magazine) highlights the point: “participate, not capture; shoot from not at.” Nickel Boys might be the epitome of this method, as it shoots from behind its characters’ very eyes. That “participation” is part of the simple reason why the film stands out from so many other depictions of the same period of troubled American history: it prioritises showing how black people live, not just what we have endured.

Nickel Boys is out now in US cinemas and in UK cinemas from 3 January