An unwritten rule of cinema is that great books very rarely make great movies. It’s not inevitable that a film adaptation of a literary classic will turn out to be a stinker, but plenty do: take Roland Joffe’s disposable and tawdry version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Brian De Palma’s notorious butchering of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, and my personal nadir, Peter Jackson’s mangling of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. There are ways of side-stepping the curse of the literary adaptation, of course, a recent example being Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a picture that kept the title and the location of Martin Amis’s novel but stripped away most of the flesh of the story to make way for Glazer’s chilling vision.
RaMell Ross’s astonishing Nickel Boys is something else altogether. Ross’s fiction feature debut (he previously directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening) is adapted by the director and co-writer/producer Joslyn Barnes from the Pulitzer-prize-winning 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, and it’s an extraordinary achievement. A version that is true to the book, honouring both its spirit and its structure, while also managing to be a genuinely groundbreaking cinematic work. This is a sublime piece of film-making.
