“Nickel Boys,” a movie adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 2019, debuted its first trailer on Thursday — a melodic and riveting slice of life from the perspective of a young man on the other side of unspeakable traumas.
From first-time feature filmmaker RaMell Ross, “Nickel Boys” dramatizes a friendship built in a reformatory school in the Jim Crow South. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August and is set to open the New York Film Festival on Sept. 27.
From Orion Pictures and Amazon MGM Studios, the drama begins its limited theatrical release on Oct. 25.
Watch the trailer below:
The film’s official synopsis reads as follows:
Elwood Curtis’s college dream shatters alongside a two-lane Florida highway. Bearing the brunt of an innocent misstep, he’s sentenced to the netherworld of Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory sunk deep in the Jim Crow South. He encounters another ward, the seen-it-all Turner. The two Black teens strike up an alliance: Turner dispensing fundamental tips for survival, Elwood, clinging to his optimistic worldview. Backdropped by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Elwood and Turner’s existence appear worlds away from Rev. Martin Luther King’s burnished oratory. Despite Nickel’s brutality, Elwood strives to hold onto his humanity, awakening a new vision for Turner.
Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson star alongside Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Ross co-wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes, adapting Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys.”
Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, David Levine and Joslyn Barnes produced the feature adaptation, with Brad Pitt, Gabby Shepard, Emily Wolfe, Kenneth Yu and Chadwick Prichard executive producing. “Nickel Boys” features music by Alex Somers and Scott Alario.
In her film review out of Telluride for TheWrap, Carla Renata wrote that “Nickel Boys” “may sound like another Black trauma porn motion picture sanctioned by Hollywood to exploit Black history for financial gain. Thankfully, through the lens of Ross, this narrative doesn’t fall into that trap we have seen for decades. Ross — mostly known for his Oscar-nominated documentary ‘Hale County This Morning, This Evening’ — brings his unique cinematic sensibility, allowing audiences to experience this type of story from a sensory perspective.”
She continued: “‘Nickel Boys’ hearkens back to a time that unfortunately still exists in some areas of America, even today. It is a hard, yet necessary watch laying out in a million ways how Black people are constantly victims of a classic case of injustice — injustice that often only happens to just us.”
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