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Tell seasoned cinephiles that a newly emerged director has dared to shoot his first big studio movie from the first-person perspective, and you’ll catch deep skepticism. Like the second-person perspective in written fiction, it typically isn’t attempted, and for good reason; most efforts fail, written off rightly as loud novelty. But it’s possible to do it well—a scene here and there in RoboCop (1987) and Being John Malkovich (1999), and in the case of Russian Ark (2002), the whole damn thing works through the eyes of the main character, who happens to walk beautifully through a single 90-minute tracking shot.
Nickel Boys is something else entirely, a cinematic revolution. Adapted from the award-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, RaMell Ross has pushed the text into startling new territory by making it the substance of an original screen language. Such brazen methods were hinted at in Ross’s brilliant 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which forged a fresh kind of real-life folklore, but the stature and size of a film as comfortably avant-garde as Nickel Boys is sure to be more riling to the broader cultural world.
A tragic yet hopeful tale about two young Black men stuck unjustly at a brutal reform camp in the 1960s, it is a transformational sequence of compositions. The character’s eye paintings are full of clever reflections and stunningly informative details, punctuated by gorgeously innovative montages, jarring collages, and aggressively emotional sound design à la The Zone of Interest (2023). Ross, in introducing the movie at autumn film festivals, urged audiences to let go, which many viewers will struggle to do. Nickel Boys will give them none of their standard movie bearings, and plenty a set of cinematic sea legs could give way. My advice: no matter how wobbly you may feel, stand your way through this marvel. PG-13, 140 min.
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