Nickel Boys was the darkhorse of this year's Oscars, although it was enthusiastically praised by the few people who actually got to see it - critics and academy members mostly.
It never made the cinemas and streaming service Amazon Prime has only now finally released it.
Nickel Boys was clearly not an easy sell - on paper. Despite its impeccable literary credentials - Colston Whitehead's novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 - it's an uncompromising film with no Hollywood happy ending to act as a safety net.
Director RaMell Ross also co-wrote the script and was one of the cinematographers, which is one of the reasons Nickel Boys is like nothing I've seen before. It's initially told entirely from the point of view of our hero, Elwood. In fact, we don't even know what Elwood looks like for more than half an hour.
Living in early '60s Florida. Elwood is brought up by Nana Hattie at the height of the Civil Rights unrest. Times are changing, says Nana optimistically, but in the American South, change comes slowly.
Scholarship boy Elwood's fatal error was being given a lift by the wrong man on his six-mile walk to a new school. The car was stolen, and innocent Elwood was convicted by association and sent to the notorious Nickel Academy, based on a real institution, where boys were sent to be rehabilitated, but were treated worse than if they'd simply been tossed in jail.
Elwood had no idea of this. He and his grandmother still believed it was all a mix-up to be sorted out, once they found themselves a good lawyer. He makes one friend at Nickel - another inmate called Turner, who has no nana looking out for him.
Turner has no family, no prospects and advises Elwood to lower his expectations. There's no getting out of Nickel.
At the so-called academy, all the cards are marked. Like something out of Dickens - or Solzhenitsyn - it's a hellhole.
Photo: supplied
The boys are put to work from dawn to dusk - only the white kids are occasionally allowed to play football - and prospects are as elusive as nana's attempt to find a good lawyer.
All the time, we're seeing this place - in fact, seeing this whole movie - through the eyes of Elwood and Turner literally.
Much of the time it's filmed by cameras strapped to actors Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson. It's an extraordinary technique, brilliantly illustrating the fact that they're the only ones who really see each other at Nickel Academy.
The one shot in the film that allows itself to show both boys is when Elwood and Turner look at each other briefly in a mirror, but there's far more to Nickel Boys than documentary-style cinema-verité.
We regularly spring forward many years later to Elwood's new life - significantly out of the south in New York City now.
The angle is slightly different now - not his eyeline, but over his shoulders. He looks older, heavier, and yet someone from Nickel Academy recognises him in a city bar and wonders what happened to Turner.
Nickel Boys is hardly - you'd think - new material, but that's not its purpose. Jails, prison farms, reform schools and racist guards have been movie staples since 1932's I'm a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, but not like this.
It's quite simply breathtaking, as much for how it's done as what it's about.
What last year's Zone of Interest did for the Holocaust movie - if you remember, it was two simultaneous films, what you saw and what you heard - Nickel Boys is equally revolutionary.
It's a photographer's take on a spare, literary novel, but what might have been an intellectual, visual experiment is brought to life by the actors, led by a dazzlingly empathetic performance by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Nana.
This isn't to take anything from director Ross and two shots by bit-part actors stay in my memory.
A bitter old white man pokes at young Elwood's chest with his walking stick - Elwood's not allowed to complain - while, on a bus to church, Elwood looks down to see a little nine-year-old girl playing on the floor and grinning up at him, without a care in the world.
She'll learn, we realise, but not today. Let her have a few moments of enjoyment.
Nickel Boys is that good and possibly the best-made thing I've seen this year.
