Documentarian RaMell Ross is turning the camera inward for an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel “Nickel Boys.”
The Amazon MGM Studios’ Orion Pictures feature chronicles the powerful friendship between two young African American men navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Jim Crow–era Florida, per the official logline.
The book is fiction, but is based on the true story of a Florida reform school that hid decades of abuse against its residents. The novel alternates between 1960s Tallahassee and the 2010s between two former students who survived the school and revisit what happened on campus amid a university investigation.
Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson star as the two young leads; the cast is rounded out by Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who is already getting Oscar buzz for her performance.
“Nickel Boys” is directed by Ross from a script he co-wrote with Joslyn Barnes. The feature debuted at Telluride and will open NYFF. Jomo Fray (“All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt”) is the cinematographer.
“Nickel Boys” marks Ross’ narrative filmmaking debut after he made the acclaimed documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” which was nominated for an Oscar.
“We need more stories of the African-American experience from a multiple of perspectives, especially from inside the African-American community,” Ross told IndieWire in 2018, “but stories are also pretty damning at times, and they can foreclose a greater understanding of the person’s life or how they got there or what composes them as person.”
“Nickel Boys” was announced as Ross’ next project in 2022. The film is produced by Plan B, which formerly partnered with author Whitehead to adapt “The Underground Railroad” as a Barry Jenkins-created series for Prime Video.
David Ehrlich’s IndieWire review for “Nickel Boys” called the adaptation a “faithful but visionary” approach to the novel.
“Ross’ formal conceit quite literally forces us to see both perspectives, but the soft poetry of his pointillistic approach — his focus on what the director refers to as ‘the epic banal’ — disabuses that philosophical difference of any and all traces of didacticism,” Ehrlich wrote. “Pure sense and subjectivity in a way that evokes the same visual magic of Ross’ documentary work, ‘Nickel Boys’ so viscerally and fundamentally centers the experience of its young Black characters that even the most racist brand of revisionist history could never hope to deny their truth.”
“Nickel Boys” premieres October 25 in theaters. Check out the trailer below.
