Nickel Boys
Short description
Set in 1960s Tallahassee, Nickel Boys follows Elwood Curtis, a Black teenager who is unjustly convicted and sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school in Florida. There he meets Jack Turner, and the two form a close friendship as they endure the brutal treatment and injustice of a corrupt institution. The film is based on Colson Whitehead's 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.
RaMell Ross directs and co-wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes. It is his second feature, following his 2018 debut Hale County This Morning, This Evening. The cast includes Ethan Herisse as Elwood, Brandon Wilson as Turner, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Hattie, Hamish Linklater as Spencer, Gralen Bryant Banks as Blakeley, and Fred Hechinger as Harper, among 41 credited cast members and 148 credited crew. Producers include Joslyn Barnes, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, with Plan B Entertainment, Anonymous Content, Louverture Films and Orion Pictures behind the production.
Made for a budget of 23 million USD, the film has grossed around 3 million USD worldwide. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.9 out of 10 from about 24,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.6 out of 10 from roughly 376 votes; a film critics' rating of 8.4 out of 10 is based on 213 reviews, notably higher than the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- When Ethan Heriss first became acquainted with the script for the future film, he focused on the plot's twists and turns and the relationships between the characters, skipping over the lines printed in small print that indicated from whose point of view a particular scene would be filmed. He only realized how unusual this project would be on the first day of filming, when the camera was hung on him.
- In the scene with the adult Elwood (played by Ethan Heriss), a fragment of Stanley Kramer's 1958 black-and-white crime drama 'The Defiant Ones' with Sidney Poitier is shown on television. This same film by Kramer is mentioned in Colson Whitehead's 2019 novel 'The Nickel Boys,' which served as the literary source for the screenplay. Whitehead became one of the screenwriters of 'The Nickel Boys'.
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