Nickel Boys Could Be The Most Radical Literary Adaptation Ever Made But How Does It Compare To The Book?

(MENAFN- The Conversation) The Nickel Boys (2019) won Colson Whitehead his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making him one of just four writers to win it twice. The novel's main setting is the Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school in mid-1960s Florida, based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys .

Like its historical counterpart, Nickel operates as a front for the coercion of unpaid labour from the boys detained there, who are subject to beatings, rapes and psychological torture, and whose efforts to run away or resist often prove fatal.

These horrors are dramatised through the experiences of Elwood Curtis, a studious, law-abiding teenager who is sent to Nickel after he unwittingly accepts a ride in a stolen car and is unjustly convicted as an accessory to the theft.

At the school, Elwood bonds with another 17-year-old inmate, Turner, whose cynicism provides a foil to Elwood's idealism. A second timeline follows the adult Elwood's efforts to build a life and maintain relationships in the aftermath of his imprisonment and escape.

Whitehead's novel achieved rapid canonisation (it is widely taught in US schools and colleges) and has the hallmarks of a“Pulitzer novel” in its balancing of accessibility and ambition. It explores weighty subject matter through storytelling of immense skill, but without the kind of bold formal experiment that might limit its mainstream appeal.

Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross. Prime

Whitehead's opening disclaimer proclaims the book to be“a work of fiction”, but his concluding acknowledgements betray what Whitehead calls the“documentary urge” of his recent fiction. So it seems fitting that his novel was adapted for the screen by RaMell Ross, a director best known for his award-winning documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018).

Nickel Boys is Ross' first dramatic feature. It is radiant: arresting, predictably harrowing, yet improbably uplifting.

'Even in death the boys were trouble'

The term“adaptation” probably undersells the film's creative daring. A Rolling Stone review calls Nickel Boys“the most radical literary adaptation ever made”. This bold claim honours the technical daring of its (almost unprecedented) experiment in sustaining a first-person viewpoint across a full-length dramatic feature. It's still more radical because it does so through the gaze of Black subjects.

Revisiting Whitehead's book after viewing the film provides insight into the strengths of each medium – what prose narrative can achieve more readily than film, and vice versa.

With its past-tense, third-person narration and rather spare prose, Whitehead's novel was not the most obvious candidate for an immersive, first-person treatment. The novel opens with a prologue that sets its subject matter at a historical remove:

The novel moves from this wry, detached institutional perspective to, in the first chapter, Elwood receiving“the best gift of his life”: a Martin Luther King record from his grandmother.

Ross' film, by contrast, is literally grounded in the individual from the outset. Nickel Boys' opening shot is of orange-tree branches against a blue sky; the camera travels down to a sidelong view of a brown arm outstretched on the grass, fingers testing the texture of a leaf. We are installed in the viewpoint of Elwood, rolling onto his side and back again.

Nickel Boys, the film, is literally grounded in an individual perspective from the outset. Prime

You don't watch Nickel Boys, so much as experience it, seeing and hearing what Elwood and (later) Turner see and hear. The external reframing of the Nickel atrocities that opens Whitehead's novel enters the film only later, and only via the adult Elwood's own exposure to media coverage of the grave sites, and his subsequent research online.

In the novel, that coverage brings the past viscerally to bear on the present for the adult Elwood:

The shift in that last sentence, from past to present tense – which at once seems to convey the character's thought in the moment, and to deliver a broader judgement – exemplifies the subtle power of Whitehead's finely tuned prose.

Everyday structural racism

There is always a risk, in narratives of extreme suffering, that their focus on extraordinary violence can distort how oppression functions. Foregrounding the grotesque horrors of a place like Nickel risks making the everyday workings of structural racism recede from view. But Whitehead's book and Ross' film both take pains to avoid this.

In the novel, Whitehead builds a network of stories – family anecdotes, community knowledge, vignettes sketching the backstories of minor characters – that reinforce a sense of systemic, pervasive violence and draw out the quieter, more insidious ways racial hierarchies are enforced.

Elwood is not only at risk inside Nickel but imperilled everywhere, subject to daily microaggressions and physical inhibition in public spaces.“In here and out there are the same,” Turner suggests. In the film, this registers in how, even before his imprisonment, Elwood keeps his eyes lowered, the camera constantly looking down – a habitual survival technique in the segregated Jim Crow South .

In both the book and the film, moments of brutal violence – whippings, attempted escapes – are never just the history of boys in an institution; they are inextricable from the broader history of Black life in America.

The novel makes this clear through allusions to King and the civil rights movement, and as it checks in with the adult Elwood at key moments over subsequent decades. The film takes this further, layering history into its visual language through montage sequences“shot through with the history of American image-making”, which unfold with a free-flowing, intuitive logic.

Some of the film's most striking images are not drawn from the book, but from Ross' poetic imagination: an alligator indoors, a crucifix dragging behind a car and throwing off sparks.

Resisting objectification of Black bodies

The visual inventiveness of Ross' film both honours and departs from Whitehead's aesthetic choices in other ways, too. In the novel, when Elwood is first brutalised in the White House – the boys' nickname for a torture chamber, borrowed from accounts of the Dozier School – Whitehead does not describe his pain, but gives us a brief history of the leather strap.

Former Dozier School inmate Roger Kiser kneels at the grave of a fellow inmate, following ceremonies dedicating a memorial to the suffering of the White House Boys. Phil Coate/AAP

The film's approach is likewise indirect. The camera, as Elwood's gaze, conveys the terror of not knowing where to look as Elwood awaits his punishment, fixing on the texture of a shirt, the corner of a metal box, and another boy's cries can be heard beneath the roar of an industrial fan. But when Elwood's turn comes, the vision cuts away to still images: black-and-white photographs showing the faces of actual Dozier School inmates. The poor quality of these grainy blow-ups bespeaks another kind of violence – the existential violence of erasure from the archive.

The film's first-person approach can sometimes be distracting, not least because of the impulse to compare it with your own sense of what looking looks like in a literal, physiological sense.

But its experiment in immersion is a political and ethical gesture, not a pedantic exercise in replicating the mechanics of sight. Its commitment to“shoot[ing] from, not towards” the Black subject (as Ross puts it in his director's commentary ) resists the objectification of black bodies, over a long history of image-making dominated by the white gaze.

Nonetheless, in stretches with little dialogue, I felt a strange sense of vacancy – of occupying the position of a recording device. Perhaps this was partly because I had read the book.

Intimate access

Fiction famously allows us to enter into the unspoken thoughts of its characters. It provides an intimacy and access to their inner lives and sensations that is impossible even in our closest real-life relationships. Film can mimic first-person vision, but cannot so easily render the mental activity of the person doing the seeing. (Voiceover has usually proved a clunky substitute.)

In the book, Elwood is wordy and reflective, full of loud thoughts and preoccupations, always future-oriented. He is an expansive, big-picture idealist and a planner. The film's Elwood is a sensuous observer, attentive to textures, movement and light, fully present in each moment.

It is a boon when Turner enters the film as Elwood's buddy and sparring partner, with whom Elwood can debate his ideals. The pivot is managed ingeniously, as a breakfast-room encounter between the boys is shown first from Elwood's perspective, then from Turner's. We get to fully see Elwood – hitherto glimpsed only in reflections – and the film alternates between the two boys' first-person views from this point on.

Whitehead resists the cheap irony of having a school supposed to“reform” juvenile delinquents turn a good boy into a bad one. The real interest lies not in how Nickel changes Elwood, but in how little it changes him. The more significant transformation occurs in the cynical Turner, who, against the odds, becomes more like Elwood.

Film can mimic first-person vision, but can't render the inner life of the person doing the seeing. Prime

In the novel, both timelines are narrated in much the same style. In the film, however, there is a crucial difference in framing between the 1960s storyline and the flash-forward sections. The adult character is filmed with a shoulder-mounted camera from slightly behind his head, rather than from his eyeline. This framing initially suggests the persistent effects of his incarceration and surveillance. It signals a lingering dissociation, a slight displacement from the self.

Yet it also creates a ghostly sense of intensified presence; of redoubling rather than absence. The character might be hovering over his own shoulder, holding himself to account and measuring himself against another's standard: with a sense of living for others, carrying the weight of survival with a deep sense of responsibility to those who didn't make it.

The technique is reminiscent of how Elwood, in Whitehead's novel, thinks of his friend Turner as seeming“simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn't have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart”.

Whitehead's novel also moves fluidly between moments and their later reframing – the immediate reaction and the later reconsideration, the split between projection and regret. The film does not attempt to replicate this. But it also does things the novel cannot.

Banality of evil – and of beauty

For much of Nickel Boys, we only hear music where the characters would hear music. But the film's subtle original score (composed by Alex Somers and Scott Alario) is exquisite – nuancing the tone, rather than prescribing emotions.

Especially stunning is the film's use of Mulatu Astatke's jazz track Nostalgia – somehow low-key and unobtrusive, yet intense and strangely upbeat. It serves to leaven the nightmare of history in an extended montage sequence, flowing over and around the images, to buoy and sustain the audience in the wake of the story's horrific climax. It leaves you aghast and exalted, a buzzing opposite of benumbed.

Thinking about the film's visual poetry, I was reminded of the words of Black intellectual and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), W.E.B. Du Bois:

Whitehead's novel seems to anticipate the kind of film it might become, when the narration describes how the national press gave people“their first real look” at the reform school:

If The Nickel Boys as a novel is concerned with the banality of evil, its film adaptation is equally attuned to the banality of beauty. Failure to exalt the gleam of sun-tipped leaves or the lamplit curve of a glass tumbler seen from below would be a failure to honour what it means to live and survive – to properly value what others have lost.

The closest equivalent for this idea in the novel occurs in a passage where, as a crisis builds, Elwood remembers a tune“from when he was little, a blues tune”:

Emerging from Whitehead's body of work – both fiction and non-fiction – is a worldview that can be dark, but never hopeless; pessimistic but not despairing. Cynical, yet never disengaged. This is true above all of The Nickel Boys, which offers mordant humour, but never comic relief.

The film honours Whitehead's ambivalence, but in a visual style that amplifies the power of a major plot twist in the novel. It turns the darkest events into a luminous fable of endurance.

Nickel Boys is now streaming on Prime Video.

MENAFN17032025000199003603ID1109324505