It was the early 1960s in Florida state. Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) lived with his grandmother, his Nana Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). One day, when Elwood hitched a ride to go to a school where he had been accepted. Unfortunately, the car he was hitching in turned out to be a driven by a notorious car thief. Elwood was arrested as an accomplice, but being a minor, he was sent to a local reform school, the Nickel Academy.
Compared to the white boys at Nickel, the black boys had poorer lodgings and endured more abuse under their white administrator Mr. Spencer (Hamish Linklater). Elwood became friends with fellow inmate Turner (Brandon Wilson), who was able to get Elwood to join him doing odd jobs with Mr. Harper (Fred Hechinger) under the table. Elwood maintained an idealistic mindset about his rights, while Turner held a more realistic view.
This film was adapted by RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes from the 2019 novel with the same title by Colson Whitehead. This book won him a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2020, coming after his book "Underground Railroad" won the same prize in 2017, a very rare two-peat. The book was based on a 111 year-old reform school in Florida which just closed down in 2011, later revealing a long history of inmate abuse, with the belated discovery of unmarked graves.
The story of racial inequality during the 1960s is certainly not a new one. However, the way director and co-writer Ross distinguished his films from other films about the civil rights movement was the unique way he told this story cinematically with alternate shifting first-person points of view -- at first from Elwood, then later Turner, then third person, and so forth. It was remarkable how we only see Elwood's face about 35 minutes into the film!
Herisse and Wilson bring us along their harrowing experiences in Nickel, as Jones shows us the tension and uncertainty of their lives in that place. Every scene of Ellis-Taylor felt like a warm grandmotherly hug. Occasionally, Ross would jump forward into present-day scenes showing an older Elwood Curtis in dreadlocks who now owned a moving company, but manages to still whip up a surprise before the film ends. 8/10
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