Brandon Wilson, left, and Ethan Herisse in Nickel Boys ( L. Kasimu Harris/Amazon Content Services)

RaMell Ross’s 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening was a lyrical, impressionistic portrait of the titular Alabama town that focused on the intimate, closely observed details of the everyday lives of its residents. It served as a powerful corrective to the often one-dimensional and stereotypical ways Black people are portrayed on-screen. With Nickel Boys, Ross’s narrative debut, he has successfully transferred his distinctive cinematic style to a fictional setting, creating an intensely moving viewing experience where cruel, brutal circumstances and visual poetry are deeply and provocatively intertwined.

Ross utilizes a bold and unusual approach to translating Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel to film. He presents the narrative mostly through the literal points of view of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). This technique imbues the extremely subjective, impressionistic images with an urgency and intimacy.

The story begins with Elwood’s early years (played in this section by Ethan Cole Sharp), living in Tallahassee, Florida, in the early 1960s with his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). Deeply influenced by Martin Luther King Jr.—a memorable early shot captures his reflection in a store window watching TV monitors airing a King speech—Elwood grows to be studious and earnest and becomes involved in civil rights protests. A high school teacher, seeing Elwood’s academic potential, encourages him to enroll in a technical college. However, as he travels to the college, he hitches a ride with a man who turns out to have stolen the car he is driving. This innocent mistake brands Elwood as an accomplice in the eyes of the police, who send him to Nickel Academy, the reform school where most of the film takes place.

At Nickel Academy, Elwood meets Turner, another teen serving his second stint at the institution. Turner’s cynical, world-weary outlook contrasts sharply with Elwood’s belief in the possibility of changing their oppressive circumstances; Turner sees no difference between life inside and outside the school. The moment when the two boys meet marks a major turning point, as the singular point of view of Elwood evolves into a dual perspective, alternating between Elwood’s and Turner’s viewpoints.

Their time at Nickel Academy consists of precious little of the education that the authorities pay lip service to and is mostly characterized by horrific abuse, exacerbated by the strictly segregated nature of the school and the differences in treatment between the Black and White students. Ross’s great achievement here is that he communicates these horrors without making a spectacle out of Black suffering. Instead, Ross allows the peripheral after-effects of the indignities and violence perpetrated on the boys to convey the oppressive, fear-filled atmosphere.

The scenes at the reformatory alternate with flash-forwards depicting one of the boys years later as an adult. Here, the POV is employed in a different way, with the camera hovering closely behind the back of his head. The depiction of this man years beyond his traumatic experiences at Nickel Academy becomes the climactic melding of Elwood’s and Turner’s perspectives, the nature of which I won’t spoil here. Suffice it to say that this concludes the adaptation on an appropriately haunting and resonant note.

Nickel Boys opened this year’s New York Film Festival, and it is not only a superior literary adaptation but also a bold and daring artistic statement. As such, it was a fitting way to kick off a festival that included other equally bold and risky cinematic visions, such as Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a decades-spanning portrait of a visionary architect, and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, a musical about a Mexican cartel boss’s transition into a woman. Nickel Boys fits in well alongside films like these, which swung for the fences and largely succeeded in expanding cinematic language and innovation.