_{[Warning: discussion and description of racism, violence, and the Holocaust]} 

In Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, a staggering work of witness and testimony, Levi arrives at Auschwitz, desperate, confused, and thirsty having suffered days without water. Shortly after, although a time not short of degradations and depravity, he reaches an opportunistic hand out of his cabin window to grab an icicle hanging off the roof to drink. A guard curtly snatches it off him. “Why?” Levi asks. “Here there is no why”, the guard replies, pushing him inside. 

‘Here there is no why’: simple and devastating, a system, a logic, a Weltanschauung. 

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Based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, RaMell Ross crafts Nickel Boys into a lyrical portrayal of friendship so mesmerising, so devastating, so emotionally suffocating that it washes over you like a revelation. Every shot is consciously defiant, down to the point-of-view perspective that defines the film, and navigates and harnesses delicacy and power, dream and reality. It’s a real gift of a film.

The story is dissected into three timelines, which, despite weaving in and out of each other, are distinguishable by the type of access the camera has to their world and its distinct sonic and emotional qualities. 

There is the dizzying world of Elwood’s childhood, all shot from his point of view. Before he’s even heard of Nickel Academy, he is a curious and studious young boy, raised by his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in Tallahassee, Florida, and encouraged by his school teacher (Jimmie Fails) to attend a college upstate. But, this world is the world of Jim Crow, and the world of the daily injustices and brutalities that entailed. 

Seen through Elwood’s (Ethan Herisse) eyes, while we only catch glimpses of him (in the motion of his mother’s iron and a shop window), the everyday is infused with childhood wonder and an almost musical quality. In one scene, Elwood’s grandmother and a white woman are shopping at opposite counters, back to back. We see only their lower halves as their steps move in time, as if choreographed, and they cross past each other and back again. In another, the fidgeting and humming of his school class around him are the beat to the speeches of Martin Luther King. 

The musicality captures Elwood’s growing understanding of the world. Sitting at the dinner table, pushing his food around, Elwood lifts up his bare arm to contemplate it: what is he seeing? He realises that the colour of his skin marks him out, a realisation of the logic of the world he has been born into. 

The most explored part is Elwood’s time at Nickel Academy, a juvenile centre supposedly for reformation, but in reality a brutalising and exploitative workhouse. The children are segregated by race, a system so Manichean there’s confusion over where to house a Mexican child. The distribution of work, punishment, and leisure between these two groups is grimly predictable. The black children receive rudimentary education, are forced to undertake slave labour, and are subject to indiscriminate abuse, beatings, and the threat of death. 

Again, it takes time for Elwood to learn the logic of his place, something that Turner (Brandon Wilson), a more world-wise and pragmatic ‘student’ helps him learn. Their friendship blossoms as Turner helps Elwood survive.  

Cementing their bond, Turner is the only other perspective utilised within the film, a bond whose depth is only fully understood later in the film. Turner’s perspective is introduced by reversing a scene we had just seen from Elwood’s perspective. It is a schism in the film, that opens further access, while also instantly creating an intimate connection between them. Together they reveal a cold and inhuman place, where children are pitted against each other, and nothing makes sense except the hard reality of those in power. It’s easy to overlook the performances of Herisse and Wilson amongst everything else, but they are both so empathetic and vulnerable.

The third part follows Elwood, now much older and with his own small removal business, and is shot from the back of his head. Despite some material and social comfort, the Academy still haunts him, and he obsessively researches it, following the cover-up, investigation, and, finally, outrage as the story reaches national attention. There is a fraught encounter with a fellow graduate of the school. The man is nervous, twitchy, and drinking again after ‘30 days drying out’. They reminisce on the edge of an emotional cliff. A ghost, the man turns into his childhood self as he hugs Elwood goodbye.

*

The film is restless and expansive. It climbs and burrows between first-person perspectives, snatched moments of reprieve or horror, dream-like scenarios, evidence shots from excavations of the site, to uncanny interactions with crocodiles and donkeys. It is hard to summarise this collage, other than to say that each bit of it feels necessary and that the effect is pure emotional attention, unsettling and elegiac. In other hands, these disparate elements could so easily clash, the symbolism could jar, and the themes could be over-intellectualised, but Ross conjures magic. There are no new accusations, only a beautiful patchwork from which to think and feel. 

The result of this magic and attention is the last half hour which is an emotional force that I have never felt in the cinema before. A purifying piece of filmmaking that strips you clean until, past the credits, you are left bleary-eyed, ‘a poor bare, forked animal as thou art’, raw and naked to the world. Scenes you may never forget: Elwood and Turner riding bikes through flat, endless, Florida fields; a train ride stolen under the stars; a hand reaching, aching, for a donkey.

*

It is with reservation that I reach for the work of Primo Levi to express how I feel about this film. There are failures in the comparison, failures, maybe, even in the idea of comparison, and the obvious risk of misunderstanding. But I cannot overlook the important connection of working amongst conditions lacking a “why?”, and do not know a better way to process and describe the feelings and power of Nickel Boys than in the company of other great works of testimony. 

Nicklel Boys is a film that does not seek to explain the Jim Crow laws, does not seek to explain the motivations of those at Nickel Academy, nor condemn them, does not seek to explain their rules (“I don’t care who started it”), and does not seek to explain the reason behind the need of it in the first place, nor its subsequent covering up afterwards. It is a film that does not seek to explain why it must be told this way, why these motifs, why these sounds. It is a film that merely asks us to bear witness while questioning what it means to do so. Not only is ‘Elwood’ a study in how an individual survives, adapts and recovers with the knowledge and memory of something like this, if it all. But this film implicates us, who live in its wake, complicit or oblivious but necessarily marked by injustices like this, and tells us we must go on finding ways to remember them. 

Elwood, for reasons perhaps he is not able to fully understand, knows instinctively that facing the kind of barbarism and violence and irrationality that he does, condemned, he must defend with all his strength his last power – the power to refuse his consent. While Elwood learns much from Turner, this is what Turner must ultimately learn from Elwood. It is a dangerous but essential lesson.

For us, perhaps the logic is reversed. We are not asked to withhold or refuse consent but demanded to give it, over and over, to such art as this, that bears the weight of witness and leaves us to judge.