RaMell Ross sometimes sends his photography students out on a unique assignment. He tells them to photograph a white person, a Black person, an Asian person and an Indian person. "And," he adds, "I want you to ask them how they want to be represented."

Before Ross was a photographer, a professor, a documentarian and, most recently, a feature filmmaker, he was a point guard whose 6-foot-6-inches height allowed him to peer over defenders to see the entire court. Ross' basketball career was derailed by injuries while at Georgetown University. But he has, ever since been fascinated with the ways we see.

In "Nickel Boys," one of the most thrillingly innovative American films of the decade, Ross adapts Colson Whitehead's 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It's about two young men — Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) — who've been sent to an abusive, mid-century Florida reform school called Nickel Academy.

The story, laced with the cruelties of the Jim Crow-era South, has commonalities with films made before. But the grammar of "Nickel Boys" is entirely its own. Ross shot the film, which opened Friday (12/13) in New York and expands in coming weeks, almost entirely from the point of view of Elwood and Turner. As we watch, we're looking through their eyes. We gaze up at the sky or feel a blow to the head or feel the warmth of someone affectionately looking back at us.

"It's an ode to looking out of the eyes of those whose eyes have been owned by others, and whose perception has been managed by others," Ross says. "Films that take place in the past reproduce the aesthetics of the past. I question the aesthetics of the past."

In a medium that has been called "an empathy machine," "Nickel Boys" is a striking leap... Read More