Nickel Boys

Two young men are bonded as friends in a Florida juvenile detention camp in the Jim Crow South.  When filmmakers turn to historical subjects of oppression and persecution, it can be difficult to communicate the feeling of living through these events. Well, independent director RaMell Ross found a way to do this, in his adaptation of a 2019 Colson Whitehead novel about a Jim Crow era juvenile reformatory in Florida, Nickel Boys. Nickel Boys opens in 1962, with an African American boy in Tallahassee named Elwood Curtis, raised primarily by his loving grandmother Hattie. Elwood is quiet and studious; he…