Richard Brody reviews RaMell Ross’s début dramatic feature—starring Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, and adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel—about a brutal reform school for Black boys.
The movie’s title refers to Black youths who are inmates of the Nickel Academy, a segregated and abusive “reform school” in rural northern Florida—particularly to two teen-agers, Elwood and Turner , who become friends while incarcerated there, in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Elwood, who is sixteen years old when he enters the facility, is being raised by his grandmother Hattie , who works on the cleaning staff of a hotel.
Spencer , who is white, administers beatings with a strap in the so-called white house, far from the barracks. An industrial fan is used to drown out the victims’ screams, but it doesn’t quite do so, and Elwood, with his view of the horrors obstructed, hears them in terror while awaiting his turn. Hospitalized as a result of the beating, Elwood gets a surprise visit from Turner, who’s also a patient .
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