RaMell Ross’ ‘Nickel Boys’ brings to life the notorious cruelty of a Southern reform school

Film director RaMell Ross is unapologetic about his focus on the Black South in his work. His first feature-length documentary, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” captures the educational experiences, the class struggles and the reverberations of Jim Crow segregation in an Alabama community, earning him an Oscar nomination in 2019. 

“Nickel Boys,” Ross’ first narrative feature, falls in line with his professional and personal mission. He and producer Joslyn Barnes adapted the film from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel “The Nickel Boys.” 

The story is set at the fictional Nickel Academy, based on the notoriously cruel Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys near Tallahassee, Florida, which operated for 111 years before being shut down by the Department of Justice in 2011. Far worse than the white children in the institution’s charge, Black children were physically and emotionally abused in the hundreds with no accountability. Nearly 100 teens and boys — and possibly more — died on its grounds, with many buried in unmarked graves. 

“It seemed perfect for me to adapt,” said Ross, who lives part time in Alabama. “I was a Black boy, and I can see myself specifically in Elwood because I grew up with a lot of love. I was a really, really, really good kid because I was afraid something small would happen and it would just escalate, and life would be derailed, and I’d let my parents down and everything they’ve done would go to waste.”

For Ross, “Nickel Boys” is also very much tied to his acclaimed documentary. 

“I think I made an unintentional proof of concept when I made ‘Hale County This Morning, This Evening,’ and the aesthetics of this film are an evolution of that,” he admitted. 

Of the two main characters in “Nickel Boys,” Jack Turner, played by Brandon Wilson, is more seasoned and he befriends the more naïve Elwood Curtis, whose bright future as a college student in the early 1960s ends when he accepts a ride from an older Black man in a stolen car. 

Turner and Elwood offer the audience entry into the heinous world of Nickel, a segregated juvenile correctional facility for boys. Unlike Turner, Elwood, played by Ethan Herisse, has a loving grandmother Hattie, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who does her best to protect him as a child and fights to free him from Dozier. 

Ross said it was important that the actors playing Elwood and Turner seem timeless. “There’s something about making historical productions or exploring history in which we over-index on the symbolism, the speech, the clothing and the background, the environment, that pushes it into this bizarre capsule of history,” he explained. 

“I would argue there’s something unconscious that happens, in which you’re like, ‘They’re not like us. They’re not the exact same as us. Or there’s something different. Times were different,’” he continued. “We were insistent on finding two boys that felt like now, that could also feel like then, which is kind of now, which is also then.”

Ross also shared his awe of Ellis-Taylor, whom he, along with Herisse and Wilson, presented the Social Impact Award for their film during the Critics Choice Association Celebration of Black Cinema & Television in Los Angeles this month. 

“She actually lives the character, which is a little bit distressing when the scenes are really, really emotional because we shoot them four or five times,” he said.

But Ellis-Taylor knows it is part of the job. 

“This is the kind of work that I want to do,” said Ellis-Taylor, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in 2021’s “King Richard,” and is beginning to receive Oscar buzz for “Nickel Boys.” “I’m beyond blessed to work with someone like RaMell Ross, to work with Ethan Herisse, to work with Brandon Wilson, and to be a part of storytelling that I feel gives some justice to those children at the Dozier School.”

Determining how to present the brutality of this painful history without glorifying it or morphing it into trauma porn was a huge challenge for Ross, who is more than aware of how irresponsibly violence against Black bodies has historically been captured in photography, film and even on the news. 

In contrast, Ross pondered ways to capture how “somatic, psychological and completely absorbed” that brutality is. It comes through in the way the film is shot through various characters’ point of view. 

Accolades for Ross indicate that the critics like his approach. He’s already won best director honors from the Gotham Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards and received a Critics Choice Awards nomination. As a film, “Nickel Boys,” which also stars Daveed Diggs in a small but important role, has received several best picture nods, including the Golden Globes.  

“The story is pretty heartbreaking,” Ross admitted, but added that “I think the ending is ultimately hopeful.” He sees it as “the sort of redemption that a lot of folks are looking for when they watch” a sad, heavy film. 

However, that hope, he shared, “comes in a way that’s more conceptual.”