Everything’s dissolving into something new and squishy and unpredictable in the commercial cinema world, but a handful of big, pre-sold brand names still take care of themselves every year. This leaves 90-95% of the other theatrical releases vulnerable to the vagaries of luck and chance and financial disappointment. I write this because “Nickel Boys,” which is the film of 2024 for me as well as a few other folks, will have to fight for the audience it deserves. It’s the narrative feature debut for photographer, visual artist, writer, educator and director RaMell Ross, whose previous work, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” was a 76-minute work of poetic nonfiction, culled from five years and 1,300 hours of footage. So often, wonderful novels such as Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys,” mapping out the human hearts forged in brutal American history, have to make do with lesser, stiffer, duller versions of themselves once they’re sold to the movies and the wrong talents or simply the limited talents take charge of the film version. A miracle happened this time, though. Ross was the right artist at the right time. “Nickel Boys” is a subtly radical act of adaptation, with a striking intuitive and meticulous visual strategy, and the result is fully equal to Whitehead’s achievement but in a new direction. Ross, who adapted the book with Joslyn Barnes, confines the camera perspectives nearly entirely to the points of view of two teenage boys, Elwood and Turner, who meet at the Nickel Academy in 1960s Florida. Based on the real-life horrors perpetrated at the Dozier School for Boys across its ignoble 111-year history, “Nickel Boys” does not unfold or marinate in the numbing, movie-stupid-style cruelty and physical trauma of nearly every other film remotely tied to stories of the Jim Crow South. Rather, director Ross goes at this material with a more searching, under-the-skin truth rare in any American film. I’ve seen it twice, and while its rhythm and methods may take some adjustment, it yields the lingering impact of a true masterwork. The narrative itself, thanks to Whitehead and screenwriters Ross and Barnes, takes care of the structure and the steady, enveloping momentum. In Jim Crow-era Tallahassee, Florida, at the dawn of the civil rights and space-race era, Elwood (Ethan Herisse in the character’s teenaged scenes, Daveed Diggs in the later passages) is raised by his loving grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, superb as always), who works service jobs and keeps her eyes on her prize. That prize, her grandson, is bright and kind and full of huge promise in an unpromising time and place. In high school, putting up with the grimly requisite amount of racial abuse from white kids and the entire power structure, Elwood finds the right teacher who alerts him to the prospect of a free college education at a nearly technical school. Hitching a ride from a shifty man in a stolen Plymouth, Elwood and the driver are pulled over and arrested for car theft. The boy’s future slams shut in an instant, while another, tougher future opens up. At the notorious state-run Nickel Academy, white boys live in one set of conditions, while the Black boys endure another. The segregation is nothing new. But the degree of the brutality, along with the hidden, buried bodies of many boys, cloud Elwood’s view of everything, both micro and macro, from daily survival to the question of how to change a system this broken. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor portrays Hattie, the grandmother raising a young boy wrongly confined to a brutal Florida reformatory institution, in “Nickel Boys.” (Orion Pictures) He makes a friend, Turner (Brandon Wilson), and this complicated friendship threads the storyline of “Nickel Boys” to its paradox of a conclusion, graceful yet upending. The finish involves spoilers and a nuanced element of mystery, so enough said. Along the way, Elwood’s sense of political activism clashes with Turner’s cynicism and smaller, less hopeful worldview. There is an act of betrayal, and an eventual plan of escape. We hear, and sometimes see, the barbarism in routine action, with sweatbox confinement and worse. The difference here is that director Ross knows just how much there is to mine in the faces and body language of a roomful of reform school residents awaiting punishment, or in the quiet, devastated aftermath. A few technical specifics, which are vibrantly artistic as well as technical. Ross and his inspired cinematographer Jomo Fray (“All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” a wondrous eyeful) shoot in the boxy 1.33:1 ratio, so the confinement and the aura of the past emerge naturally. The first minutes of “Nickel Boys” ease us into how we’re going to experience this dark adventure, streaked with humanistic light. In broad terms the first part of the film is shown through the eyes of Elwood, beginning with the boy lying on the grass, fingering a fallen leaf. We see from his eye’s view, as he looks directly at his grandmother, or gazes down a Tallahassee sidewalk. Later the perspective shifts to Turner’s. At one point, we see both boys together, grinning at a mirrored ceiling. At another point, Turner regards himself in the passenger-side rearview mirror of the Nickel Academy pickup (Fred Hechinger plays the driver, Harper, with just the right menacing ease). Brandon Wilson co-stars in director RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys.” (Orion Pictures) This sounds schematic, but Ross is something of a genius in varying the rhythms and the visual change-ups. Grandmother Hattie and other adults are shown at one striking moment, in the reflection of the window of an electronics storefront. Eight early ‘60s TVs in the window display share the same image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., wondering how long before the promised freedoms become real. It’s a canny timeline marker for the audience, as well as the most persuasive possible reminder that history is not made by words, but the words matter more than we know. “Nickel Boys” production designer Nora Mendis brings this period to detailed life in practically every shot. Ross intercuts archival footage from all over the place, but selectively, so that metaphors of escape and freedom and imprisonment echo throughout the film. When adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) begins intersecting with the younger Elwood and Turner’s scenario, in scenes taking place closer to our present day, the camera shifts to the back of this character’s head, so that the first-person POV becomes a more fluid instrument, rather than a rigid scheme of attack. The miracle, I think, is that “Nickel Boys” feels like a single two-hours-and-change exhalation of breath, giving life to a story based in miserable, undeniable fact. There is no miserablism at work here, though, no contrived melodrama. It’s clear-eyed and quietly urgent storytelling in every useful way, unconventionally imaginative in the unspooling. The emotional states and historical facts undergirding this film speak to us all, wherever we are. As Turner says at one point to Elwood, his eyes slowly opening to what may lay beyond the life they’ve known: “There’s Nickels all over the country.” Column: With ‘Nickel Boys,’ filmmaker RaMell Ross brings a new POV to a real-life horror story “Nickel Boys” — 4 stars (out of 4) MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic material involving racism, some strong language including racial slurs, violent content and smoking) Running time: 2:20 How to watch: Premieres in theaters Jan. 3 Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.