In finding a new way to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross changes the way we perceive the world itself. The director’s previous feature, the Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was a lightning-strike cinematic discovery. With its fragmented, intimate lyricism, it immersed us in the details of Black life in a small Alabama town, gradually centering on a few years in the lives of two teens.