Nickel Boys

Grade: D+

I was not of sound mind and body the day I watched Nickel Boys. I’d lost about half my previous night of sleep due to some vicious insomnia. These reviews are about my first impression, and I found Nickel Boys to be a bewilderingly confounding, boring, confusing, inconsistently made, grandiose, artsy-fartsy spasm of a movie. When it wasn’t any of those things, it veered off into dreamlike surrealism. David Lynch is already rolling in his grave. Upon the film’s ending, I whispered some words I don’t print here.

I’m happy for RaMell Ross, a fairly new director, and the success he is having with this film. It’s based on a 2019 novel called The Nickel Boys. It’s 1962, and young Elwood is being raised by his grandmother Hattie (the wonderful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, from Origin and King Richard). Elwood is accepted into a tuition-free accelerated study school. While hitchhiking to the campus, he takes a ride from a man who, it turns out, stole the car they’re in. The police stop them, and of course think Elwood is an accomplice. Elwood, being underage, is sent to a notoriously abusive reform school called the Nickel Academy, where he meets his future best friend Turner.

The camera work is all over the place. It can’t pick a lane. Once I caught on that it was shot in “first person” point-of-view, from Elwood’s perspective, I thought “cool!” A third of the way through, we are all of a sudden seeing things from Turner’s POV. I was maddeningly perplexed by the first scene where we were “inside” Turner. It’s a conversation with Hattie, and she doesn’t recognize him, and I wondered why. Once it got cleared up, I thought “ok, I guess we’re bouncing back and forth between Elwood and Turner. This could be good.” But then sometimes it’s neither, and the camera is just a camera, showing everybody, like a traditional movie.

That’s not all. At other points, the camera is right behind someone, and we constantly see the back of their head as we follow them around, like in a video game. This approach makes a late plot reveal confusing. Nickel Boys really didn’t hit with me. I only saw it because it’s showing up on every Oscar prediction list, particularly as a Best Picture nominee. I hope it DOES get at least one major nomination, because otherwise, that would mean I could have skipped it. People are loving it, though. You’d have to be crazy or sleep-deprived to dislike it.

Grade: D+