Harrowing tales of black boys and men during the Jim Crow era are the meat and potatoes of Pulitzer Prize winning author Colson Whitehead’s fiction. When filmmaker RaMell Ross, who made the acclaimed 2018 documentary “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening,” was given an advanced reading copy of Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, he was working on an exhibition in New Orleans on the history of the American South and its imprint on the Black soul. His installation and the novel, about two boys in a barbaric reform school serving time for arbitrary crimes—essentially because they were Black and vulnerable– seemed to put the filmmaker on a thematic path toward his exploration of Black identity.

The result is an edgy film, arty in the best sense. Innovative, the movie takes a novelistic approach to visual storytelling. About a real-life reform school, the fictive Nickel Academy, is grim –and even grimmer for its Black population. Punishment, perhaps a turn on a torture device meted out by Spencer (Hamish Linklater) may also extend to murder and burial in an unmarked grave. Given the disquieting details, as viewer, you may find yourself looking up at a face, the sky, the branches of an orange tree, the interior of a dorm or cafeteria from an unexpected angle, and wonder, how did they get that shot?

At the premiere screening, on the New York Film Festival’s opening night, Ross spoke about not wanting to overburden the actors with concepts but to have them experience each other. He fitted the actors with camera rigs literally strapped on. In more traditional filming, you always assume the camera is there. With the rig on, actors have always to be more aware. Daveed Diggs spoke about wearing the heavy rig all day for fear of losing perspective. Fred Hechinger observed that actors and cameramen seemed to exchange roles in the filmmaking. The result is as close as I’ve ever seen to a novel-to-film adaptation that translates technique as well as story. Already nominated for top awards, RaMell Ross and “The Nickel Boys” are high on the lists predicting Best Director/ Best Film Oscar nods.

You can think of “The Nickel Boys” as a buddy movie, with Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner  (Brandon Wilson) forming the central relationship in this nasty place in 1962 Tallahassee, Florida. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is Elwood’s grandmother, an essential heartbeat grounding the boys’ impossible situation in the human realm. The actress spoke about tracking the director down to Providence where he teaches at Brown to work with him. And what does Colson Whitehead think about the film? RaMell Ross said, he’s a guy who just wants to write his novels. When they spoke, he said, “lotsa luck,” which is probably a blessing.