Point of view is central in The Nickel Boys

Nickel Boys is not the first first-person film. However, it is the one that, more than any other, has made it a stylistic hallmark disconnected from inter-media contaminations or other narrative supports (such as lenses or cameras), putting the viewer in first person not as if they were facing a video game, but by having them wear the very skin of the characters. This is the difference between the work of RaMell Ross and operations such as, for example, Hardocore! by Il'ja Najšuller, entirely shot in first person where the blend of adventure, action, and cyborg fantasies makes it more of a game to live rather than an experience to enjoy. This is precisely the intention of the director and screenwriter of Nickel Boys, who co-wrote with Joslyn Barnes starting from the Pulitzer Prize-winning text by Colson Whitehead, whose eponymous book on which the film is based was published in 2019, receiving recognition the following year (the second after that achieved in 2017 for The Underground Railroad). A work on perception, as defined by RaMell Ross. Not a video game in which one takes the reins of the characters’ destinies, but the idea of an immersive cinema that replaces the audience’s skin with that of the protagonists. It is no coincidence that the “skin” is exactly the focal point of both the literary and cinematic work, a historical snapshot of the Sixties and the everyday reality of racial laws (abolished in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act).

Inspired by the tragic events that really occurred at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida, the story focuses on the young Elwood Curtis who, after entering reform school due to a misunderstanding, meets his companion Jack Turner. Already, the custodial sentence is an obstacle to a future that, for the boy, looked brighter than what fate had in store, and his condition will worsen when he gradually becomes aware of the violence that many young people suffer within the institution, only to be killed and buried. A true story, made even more so when filtered through the eyes of the characters. The scrutiny of the boys becomes that of the audience itself, attentive and involved as they investigate with their gaze the dramatic events at the Nickel Academy, growing with the characters and, in turn, exploring their ideas linked to the words of Martin Luther King for Elwood and to Turner’s conviction that violence must be met with equal violence. And yet it is precisely the violence that Ross did not want to push himself to show, not seizing the easy opportunity to let his POV plunge into the heart of the atrocities suffered by the young people at the institution, instead displaying a restraint that is not timorous but respectful and measured, especially given the strong and emotional charge of the film. After all, it would have taken only a moment to slip into orchestrated pain designed to make the viewer suffer, whereas it is a powerful delicacy that passes through the camera – and thus the eye, and therefore the gaze – of Nickel Boys. «I do not want to reproduce all of this,» explained the director. «There is already enough violence in the story, and there was a risk of rendering many actions empty. And when you realize you do not want to show it exactly as it is, many other different ways come to mind to express exactly the same thing». Ultimately, that is what the director achieved with his directing approach: he changed the angle of reproduction and discovered that a story can be told from so many points of view, even such personal ones.

«I wonder what Black people will feel seeing their perspective literally in the image, simultaneously with the cinematic one,» the director pondered. «And then I also wonder what those who are not part of this minority will feel, what it will be like to wear someone else’s clothes. […] It is an experiment on how reality aligns with the character, with lived reality penetrating into the sensory reality of the viewers. It seemed like an opportunity to seize». And that is the entire meaning of I ragazzi della Nickel, an overlay that is never an end in itself, but one that embraces both those on screen and those observing from the outside. «It’s the craziest thing in the film», explained Nicholas Monsour, the film’s editor, who stated that after watching the film, one ends up looking at faces in a different way. «Part of what is fascinating about the first-person POV is that you learn about the character through what they choose to look at, and that told me a lot about the protagonists when I started watching the film». But it is not just sensitivity, it is technique. For his “theoretical orientation” Monsour revisited university texts on phenomenology that study perception, as well as the work of the philosopher Lewis Gordon who deals with racial modalities, all useful material for the purposes of editing. A communion between repertoire, fiction, and subjectivity: a journey not only back in time through the characters of Nickel Boys but also within oneself.