Nickel Boys is the story of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson), a pair of black youth, one idealistic, the other cynical, who are snatched from their families and placed into a juvenile reformatory where students are routinely tortured. The story is a fiction based on the real Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida where violent crimes against students were regularly committed — and with students suffering many of the exact same tortures that were perpetrated on their ancestors by white hands. Nickel Boys is set in Jim Crow Florida in the 1960s, and partially in the 2010s, where one of the characters revisits his trauma through news articles online. Like the novel on which it is based, the film is well done. The visuals are pretty and it is worth streaming. It is a hard task to confront brutal history and shape it into something truthful yet palatable, let alone entertaining.