If the buzz out of Telluride is true, Amazon MGM might have a dark horse award season favorite on their hands with Nickel Boys. Director RaMell Ross earned accolades with his breakthrough documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which explores the lives of Black people living in Alabama’s Black Belt. But Nickel Boys marks his first narrative feature, adapting with Joslyn Barnes the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Colson Whitehead.
Nickel Boys stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and The Last Black Man in San Francisco‘s Jimmie Fails. The story centers on the friendship between two Black teenage boys as they navigate a brutal reform school in Jim Crow-era Tallahassee, Florida.
SYNOPSIS: Elwood Curtis’s college dream shatters alongside a two-lane Florida highway. Bearing the brunt of an innocent misstep, he’s sentenced to the netherworld of Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory sunk deep in the Jim Crow South. He encounters another ward, the seen-it-all Turner. The two Black teens strike up an alliance: Turner dispensing fundamental tips for survival, Elwood, clinging to his optimistic worldview. Backdropped by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Elwood and Turner’s existence appear worlds away from Rev. Martin Luther King’s burnished oratory. Despite Nickel’s brutality, Elwood strives to hold onto his humanity, awakening a new vision for Turner.
Nickel Boys hits select theaters on October 25th, following appearances at NYFF and BFI London.
