Colson Whitehead's superb adaptation of RaMell Ross

RaMell Ross's gripping narrative debut Nickel Boys does not begin, like the Colson Whitehead novel on which it is based, with an exhumation. Instead, it opens with signs of life: oranges hanging from the branches of a tree; a hand stroking the grass; a winking voice calling “Elwood, Elwood, Elwood” like a song.

Details like these are important in Nickel Boyswhich debuted at the Telluride Film Festival before opening the New York Film Festival next month, because they mark the passage of time and honor family rituals. Inside the house: glimpses of a gold bracelet wrapped around a delicate wrist, the sound of cards being shuffled, and honeyed laughter bouncing off the walls. These details shape memories, which eventually crystallize into evidence of an existence.

In his directorial debut, nominated for an Oscar Hale County, this morning, this eveningRoss constructed a stunning and unforgettable portrait of Hale County, Alabama. He sculpted an 80-minute documentary from more than 1,300 hours of footage, shot over five years, focusing on details—like a grandmother cooing to soothe a cranky child, the color of a cheerleading squad’s uniform—that captured the rhythms of daily life for black residents in this area steeped, like many places in the American South, in a history of racism. A loose narrative centered primarily on Daniel and Quincy, two high school basketball players Ross met while working as a teacher and coach. One succeeds in college, while the other finds himself grounded by the responsibilities of a growing family.

Hale County This Morning, Tonight also reflected Ross's aesthetic ambitions, the way the artist comes to understand and represent the texture of a landscape. Connect the past: Hale County is where photographer Walker Evans documented the lives of three sharecropping families in Now let's praise famous men and where Martin Luther King Jr. sought refuge in a safe house from the Ku Klux Klan—in the present and back into the past. The exercise suggested Ross’s intentions to push the boundaries of gender to find the edges of black representation and, in his words, “the orbit of our dreams.”

With Nickel BoysRoss extends his vision into narrative space. He makes Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel his own, a deft and moving account of two boys in a punishing Florida reform school. Here, the artist returns to and expands on some familiar themes: black boyhood and masculinity, the anchoring force of community, and, of course, the landscape and its secrets.

Nickel Boys begins with Elwood Curtis, a young black boy initially played by Ethan Cole Sharp, living in Tallahassee with his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) during the height of Jim Crow. He attends a school where the textbooks, once owned by white students, are tainted with caricatures and racist epithets.

But Elwood finds solace in the words of Dr. King. Rumors of strikes and boycotts have hit his corner of the South, and Elwood wants to join the good fight. His high school teacher, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), a convivial tutor and former organizer, thinks Elwood has a real future. He encourages the quiet, mostly solitary boy to apply for college courses. Elwood jumps at the chance, but fate can be a cruel referee.

A lawyer Hattie later hires calls the situation a classic miscarriage of justice. Elwood (now played by When they see us actor Ethan Herisse) goes for a ride with a sharp-dressed black man the cops accuse of stealing a car. The officer considers the baby-faced boy an accomplice and sends him to juvenile hall. We experience all this action in concise bursts of images through the intimate subjective point of view of cinematographer Jomo Fray. An orange tree coming into focus becomes a flash of television screens; it becomes the technical college brochure sliding off the refrigerator, too heavy even for a magnet; it becomes the back of a police car; it becomes the pristine lawns of Nickel Boy Academy. As Elwood enters his new home, a menacing, harsh tune by Scott Alario and a score by Alex Somers warn of trouble to come.

The danger is vulgar but, like Whitehead, Ross does not sensationalize. Nickel Boys treats the horrific experiences of its incarcerated youth with a matter-of-factness that doesn’t contradict the cure. The beatings in the ominously named White House shack, the hard labor in the fields (the orange trees turned into a menace), and the abuse at the hands of the staff are all captured with a melancholic sobriety. They’re presented in the same kind of shots as Elwood’s biography; curator Nicholas Monsour connects them, finding a staccato rhythm in the transitions.

Between scenes, Ross reminds us of the past: grainy interstitial footage, selected by archival producer Allison Brandin, connects the experiences of Elwood and the Nickel Boys to a larger American story. Whitehead’s novel was inspired by the real Dozier School for Boys, whose scarred former students came forward a decade ago to tell their stories.

In a flash-forward to a more contemporary time, Elwood sits hunched over a computer and watches images of exhumed graves discovered near Nickel. There’s a sense that justice could be done in these scenes, but it’s weighed down by the trauma of the details. Nickel Boys moves between the real past, as seen through archival footage, and the fictional past and present of the story. (In this present, the weakest of the three threads, Elwood is played by Daveed Diggs.) Ross, with Fray, creates his own grammar for understanding. Close-ups define the visual aesthetic. The structure of Nickel Boys echoes Raven Jackson's approach in All dirt roads taste like saltof which Fray was also director of photography.

At Nickel, Elwood meets Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson), whose cynicism toward the system and carefree attitude clash with Elwood's moral code, modeled after Dr. King. The two strike up a friendship, strengthened by their off-campus work assignments with Harper (TelmaFred Hechinger), the kind of white guy who thinks he’s good. While essentially being loaned out for odd jobs, Elwood and Turner swap origin stories and discuss their worldviews.

Ross, honoring the shift in perspective that characterizes Whitehead's novel, alternates between Elwood and Turner's points of view, remaining, at all times, in the subjective mode. The commitment to this way of narrating infuses Nickel boy with overwhelming intimacy and becomes another way Ross, as a filmmaker, expands what it means to represent black people. How easy it would have been to maintain an objective, neutral distance as we watch Elwood and Turner. Instead, Ross takes a risk, and it pays off.

The friendship between Elwood and Turner is the focal point around which all the rest of the story revolves. Herisse and Wilson offer startling performances that deepen our understanding of this bond and illuminate the trauma of the experience. Their faces, frozen even when they talk about happier memories, reveal the weariness of navigating a system determined to close off your options. Ellis-Taylor doesn’t have a major role but, as usual, she’s up to the task when she’s on screen. Hattie, a matriarch, is in her own way butchered by the system.

Comparisons with MoonlightBarry Jenkins's personal exploration of black boyhood and masculinity may be inevitable, especially since Nickel Boys conquers a wider audience, but Ross is conquering his cinematic territory. The difference is all in the details.