Hamish Linklater

Nickel Boys delivers an imaginative drama of friendship countering racism. Incorporating appalling events from the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, director RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys adapts Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel detailing brutality at that juvenile reformatory. After a 2012 forensic anthropology survey documented numerous unmarked graves and over 100 deaths, further investigation authenticated barbaric treatment at this Florida reform site for over one hundred years, 1900 to 2011.

Nickel Boys is a drama of memory and resolve, of paths that cross and lives that change in immutable ways. Based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about the unconscionable abuse at a Florida boys reform school during the Jim Crow era, it’s a powerful, evocative story of friendship, pain, survival, and redemption. The film demonstrates the value in excavating the past for a better future, something this country often stubbornly refuses to do. (The current push to remove language about racism from government initiatives and school curricula makes this story as relevant as it is timeless.) The past might be wrenching and uncomfortable, but it never stays buried, and only by reaching out to each other can we fully heal.