“Nickel Boys,” an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, will open the 62nd New York Film Festival in September, organizers said Monday.
Filmmaker RaMell Ross directed the drama based on the 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in an abusive reform school in Florida in Jim Crow-era Florida. Whitehead used the real Dozier School for Boys, and its victims, as a model. The cast includes Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.