Adapting an acclaimed book for the screen isn’t always wise. Too often, literary devices that propel a story on paper weigh down the visual medium. Thankfully, that’s not the case in Nickel Boys, writer-director RaMell Ross’ second feature-length film (“Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” the first documentary, won him a Peabody Award.) Perhaps the most visually arresting movie of the year, Ross’ inventive, original style brings humanity, grace, and even beauty to Colson Whitehead’s harrowing novel about Jim Crow violence and justice miscarried.

The film opens in the innocence of dreamy childhood and young adulthood, with fragments of Elwood’s (Ethan Herisse) hopeful, studious, romantic young years. We see what Elwood sees: a tree, a bee, a girlfriend. But because the camera is restricted to Elwood’s point of view, we only catch a glimpse of our main character in a reflection or in a snapshot from a photo booth.

This device could prove annoying, but instead, it serves to bring us inside the character. We see what he sees; we feel what he feels. Empathy is taken to a whole new level. Raised by his beloved grandmother Hattie (the excellent Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Elwood is recruited at 16 to attend a Black technical college for talented students. But childhood ends the day he hitchhikes to college and accepts a ride from the wrong person.
The year is 1962, and a white trooper pulls over the two Black men; the car is stolen, both are charged and Elwood, a minor, is sent to a segregated reform school for boys, Nickel Academy.

Here begins the heart of the movie. Based on a real school that operated in Florida from 1900 until 2011, the horrors of the place echo similar institutions depicted in other movies: the Indian residential Canadian school depicted in Sugarcane and the abusive Australian orphanage of Rabbit Proof Fence. Housing children as young as five, who were brought in for “truancy” or “incorrigibility,” the goal of Nickel is to debase, terrorize, brutalize, torture, and, in some cases, murder students who might just have a sense of their worth as humans.

Ross masterfully handles the violence by deciding what not to show. Because the film only reveals what the character sees, Ross heightens the young man’s fear and avoids sensationalizing the violence. The only way Elwood – and we as audience members – survive this story is through friendship. Turner (Brandon Wilson) walks into Elwood’s life one day in the mess hall. And suddenly, we are introduced to Turner’s POV. The camera shows us Elwood’s face, hands, and body for the first time. The movie deepens and twists as the two struggle to stay alive. There are four ways out of Nickel: court intervention, running away, aging out, on your eighteenth birthday, or dying.

You’ll have to see the movie to find out how Turner and Elwood depart. What could have been a depressing march through a slice of regrettable history instead bears transcendent witness to lives that deserve to be seen. The movie inspires, informs, and ultimately honors the dignity of individuals caught up in – but never defined by circumstances beyond their control.