Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Films are not a first person art form. Characters are put in front of us; the point of view is ours. Nickel Boys, the lucid new feature from director RaMell Ross, changes perspective and upends convention. The heart of the movie is Elwood Curtis, an academically gifted Black teenager in early 1960s Florida, and for much of the movie we see only what he sees, as if the camera were his gaze.Fleeting images capture childhood and adolescence: a Christmas tree, a deck of cards, TV sets in a window display. The effect is heady; scenes from a life being lived. Finally, some way into the movie, Elwood glimpses himself in a photo booth snapshot: gangly, half-smiling, a little wary. (He is played by Ethan Cole Sharp, later by Ethan Herisse.)A world changes before we see him again. A college place with free tuition opens up. Hitchhiking to get there, he takes a ride from a slick dude in a blue Chevy Impala. Wrong car, wrong time and place. Soon Elwood is held at the Nickel Academy, a juvenile detention facility. We see the new kid now through the eyes of worldly fellow inmate Turner (Brandon Wilson). The movie blooms into a dual perspective. Friendship finds a place, here where Elwood shouldn’t be. Neither should anyone else. The film is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel, in turn inspired by the real and infamous Dozier School, closed in 2011, a relic of the Jim Crow era whose full ghastly history would only then come to light. A Nickel boy, a guard announces, “looks to reform himself”. For segregated Black inmates, that high-flown language translates to forced labour and a policy of grievous violence. If Ross’s ambitious choices were to seem a mere gimmick, it would be at this point in the film. In fact, his bold approach is perfect. We feel doubly connected to Elwood having shared his vision. And it makes a statement just as powerful that, in contrast, the film doesn’t show us the brutality of Nickel. We know it is happening. The implicit question: what would we learn watching it?And yet for all the radical dazzle of Ross’s filmmaking, human drama is always the crux. We see the cruelty of fate and men; the grace of a grandmaternal love; the dogged way Elwood records the crimes of Nickel in a notebook, hoping truth will one day out. Is the first weekend of January too soon to talk about films of the year? Fine. The movie will be just as good in December.★★★★★In UK cinemas from January 3 and in US cinemas now
