Telluride: ‘Nickel Boys’ leaves world premiere ‘stunned’ with ‘bold, arresting filmmaking’

Christopher Rosen
·5 min read

When Telluride Film Festival director Julie Huntsinger introduced “Nickel Boys” at its world premiere screening on Friday night, she didn’t hold back any excitement – not that she has at all in the walk-up to the 51st annual event. “It’s such a towering achievement. I couldn’t believe it. My jaw dropped to the floor,” Huntsinger told Indiewire in an interview published Thursday. “You almost can’t speak after because it’s cinematically engaging, arresting. It is emotionally rewarding. It should be one of the most talked about films of the whole year.”

Based on the response to the film on Friday night, Huntsinger’s prediction might come true. “Nickel Boys,” filmmaker RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel “The Nickel Boys,” had audience members searching for new ways to express their admiration for Ross’s work.

More from GoldDerby

“Thought this was astounding. This is how you adapt a great novel into a great movie. Left me in a kind of stunned silence, filled with radical choices that pay off beautifully. Wow,” wrote Vanity Fair correspondent David Canfield.

The raves didn’t stop there (more can be found below) and it is easy to see why: “Nickel Boys” is unlike any narrative film in recent memory, shot almost entirely in the first-person perspective (with some key sections later in the film shifting to a second-person approach). The film tells the story of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), “a bright, striving Black teenager navigating the terrors of Jim Crow South who makes a split-second decision that recasts the course of his life. On the cusp of college, he’s instead sentenced to time at a notorious reformatory. There he encounters a kindred spirit with Turner (Brandon Wilson), forming an alliance, but one with incalculable consequences.”

“The book is so very cause and effect, and it’s so perfect in its economy that when we first saw it, we were like, ‘It’s too perfect’ And also, in a way, you know it is a site of trauma. Neither one of us wanted to see the continued brutalization of Black bodies on film. We’d been saturated,” co-writer Joselyn Barnes said in the film’s press notes. The question then became: “How do you acknowledge the pain that’s real, but at the same time, how do you frame things in a different way?” 

The choice was then made to use the first-person perspective. “One of RaMell’s greatest gifts is ‘how to look.’ So, point of view became central to how we wanted to address the film. RaMell has a real interest in those interstitial moments, and how you can actually open up the spectrum of possibilities.”

Added Ross, who makes his narrative feature debut with “Nickel Boys” (he was a previous Oscar nominee for his debut documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening”), “I didn’t know how to write a script, but I know how to make images as a photographer. So the first ‘script’ was all images. I was always in awe of George Miller, who made ‘Mad Max: Fury Road.’ He storyboarded the entire thing before he even added any writing. I thought, ‘Ah! I understand that process.’ Then Joslyn and I can retroactively fill in the language.”

He continued, “I was thinking about the poetry of what was possible, visually. When I realized: ‘Oh, what I can do is just imagine from my eyes anything, visually, that has to do with my childhood—or an imagined childhood—and it’ll iterate a young Black male visualization of the world.”

In addition to Ross’ filmmaking and a standout performance from Ellis-Taylor (a previous nominee for “King Richard”), “Nickel Boys” boasts exemplary cinematography from Jomo Fray (“All Dirt Roads Lead to Salt”) and editing by Nicholas Monsour (“Nope,” “Us”).

Produced by Plan B and Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, David Levine, and Barnes, Amazon MGM and Orion Pictures will debut “Nickel Boys” in limited release on October 25. The film is next set to open the New York Film Festival. 

Read more social media raves for “Nickel Boys” below.

Best of GoldDerby

Sign up for Gold Derby's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.

  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next