Nickel Boys review: the brilliant Oscar contender you won’t see in Australian cinemas

Nickel Boys, Anora, Conclave, Emilia Perez, A Complete Unknown, I’m Still Here, The Substance, Wicked, Dune: Part Two, The Brutalist. What do these films have in common? They’re this year’s Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards.

Only one film stands out, however, as being the single nominee that hasn’t played in Australian cinemas. Instead, it has been resigned to direct-to-streaming status this month. Can you guess which one that is?

Watch the trailer for Nickel Boys.

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Nickel Boys: a must-watch drama

Nickel Boys was a novel before it was a movie. Written in 2019 by American author Colson Whitehead, the story follows the fictional characters of Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, two African American boys living in the 1960s who are sent to the abusive Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory in Florida (which is based on the very real Dozier School).

In the film, we follow two first-person perspectives: initially, that of Elwood (played by Ethan Herisse), whose hopeful optimism spawns from seeing the changes in society brought about by Martin Luther King, Jr., and from his stalwart and cheery Nanna Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) who doesn’t let a thing bring her down. When he is unjustly incriminated as an accomplice to a robbery, we enter the Nickel Academy, meet Jack, and the perspective splits – to be shared by the two of them.

The film is one of the most unique works of art you’ll see this year – especially when compared to its Oscar-nominated companions. From the opening shot of an orange tree bearing new fruit against a bright summer’s sky, we rarely leave the point-of-view of its beholder.

As a child, Elwood is a keen observer and collector of hope. We see the world through his eyes: a world of evolving technology, space travel and shifting Civil Rights that allow him to go to an all-Black school and carve out a place for himself in society.

The shots in Nickel Boys are all at once beautiful and arresting: a shop window where multiple TVs play Martin Luther King Jr.s’ famous speech, a trailer truck driving with a giant wooden cross strapped to the tray, a dark motel at night where an alligator who may or may not be real emerges from the car park gutter.

They paint a picture of the American South where despite the evident dangers there remains a burgeoning hope for African Americans.

Our first glimpse of Elwood’s face is when he is quietly watching his Nanna iron clothes – he notices his reflection in the shiny silver iron, and watches it track back and forth. The significance of framing of his little body in the centre of a tool of manual labour is not lost on me.

Still, wherever he goes, he sees possibility: the possibility that the American dream is not just for white folk, and the possibility that he can achieve every ambition he’s ever dreamed of. That dream seems to come true when he is offered a free spot at the Melvin Griggs Technical School, a specialist college.

Elwood is given a pamphlet for Melvin Griggs by his high school teacher, which he then takes home and places on the fridge. Nanna is elated, seeing a chance for her grandson to become something more than she ever was allowed to be.

As she talks excitedly to a friend on the phone, the magnet securing the pamphlet begins to slide down the fridge. Only a few scenes later is he being arrested, following a misunderstanding that arose after he got into a benevolent stranger’s car and discovered it was stolen.

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Nickel Boys and the violence inherent in the system

Whenever Elwood is being reprimanded, or in fact whenever he senses trouble, the camera looks down and away to either side of his feet. We as viewers are forced to follow his attempts to stay out of trouble; to be a ‘good boy’ and ‘keep [our] nose clean’. The intimacy afforded from having every shot come from the perspective of Elwood’s eyes is both warm and incredibly confronting.

Instead of placing the audience as voyeurs of Black suffering, we become the subject. For the film’s 2.5 hour runtime, we live in the body and mind of its protagonists – and we cannot look away until they do.

Elwood’s wrongful arrest leads him to the Nickel Academy, where his dreams are not quite dashed, but certainly diminished. Put up on the ‘coloured’ side of the school, he and his classmates are immediately framed as ‘grubs’ by the mostly-white staff, who lecture them about working their way up to ‘ace’ status through hard work and subservience.

He quickly finds a kindred spirit in Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson), whose past we know little about – except for the fact that he has no living family.

Through Elwood’s eyes, we see Turner becoming a trusted confidant and his only friend at the institution. When the camera switches up, we see Elwood through Turner’s eyes; now a young man, weathering the many storms of Nickel as the fire behind his eyes gradually becomes but an ember. The two boys become as close as brothers, with Turner being the spiritual eldest, helping Elwood learn the ropes and showing him the hidden atrocities of Nickel: where they tie students to trees for beatings, where they lock them away to endure unthinkably high temperatures and ‘sweat’ out their ‘sin’, and the many unmarked graves where the ones that don’t make it are dumped.

Nickel Boys in present day

Among these horrific revelations, we jump timelines to the present day. An adult Elwood is seen from behind as he researches the atrocities carried out by Nickel and attempts to get in touch with the classmates who survived them.

The suggestion of survival is something of a balm to viewers, but still the violence inherent in the system lingers. Never glorified, but always presented truthfully, the violence carried out at the fictional Nickel represents the violence against People of Colour that continues, often insidiously, to this day.

One of the most painful observations at Nickel is the complicities of the African American staff who uphold the racism of the place. Whether out of fear or a sense of self preservation, their role in the violence is one of the most significant, since they are modelling their behaviour onto the impressionable young men who are stuck at the academy.

In only a handful of years, Elwood has gone from seeing Civil Rights protests on screens at the downtown AV store, to participating in said protests, to watching hopelessly as another Black man leads him into a room to be beaten senseless by a white man.

Though it depicts a specific point in history, and through a fictional lens at that, Nickel Boys is one of the most relevant, most important films of the decade. It remains a frustrating fact that you cannot watch it in Australian cinemas. Though I cannot say for certain that it is due to a racial bias, there is a noted pattern of African American stories being shunned here – see last year’s Oscar nominee American Fiction also being relegated to streaming-only.

Despite this, you should seek to watch Nickel Boys in any way that you can. It’s a stunning work of art that will leave you deeply affected.

Nickel Boys is now streaming on Prime Video.