For his debut as a narrative director, the Oscar-nominated director envisions a radically new way to adapt Colton Whitehead's novel, inviting audiences to identify more deeply with the main characters.

From “Boy A” (the film that launched Andrew Garfield’s career) to “Zero for Conduct,” films set in run-down boarding schools and juvenile detention centers abound. With “Nickel Boys,” director RaMell Ross finds fresh color in such a rigidly codified genre, transforming a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a minimalist tone poem. Colson Whitehead’s book is brilliant, but you’ve probably seen much of it on screen before, so Ross strips away as many words as possible and instead uses images to tell the story of Elwood, a Tallahassee teen who’s so much more than a victim of the system.

Except that Ross doesn’t so much tell the story as inhabit it, to the extent that I found myself wondering whether I could have followed the plot—which alternates between the 1960s and the early 2000s—had I not already read Whitehead’s novel. (I suspect that will be a challenge for others, who should take the novel’s unconventional form as an invitation to look beyond the plot for other ways to participate in Elwood’s experience.) For the first hour or so, “Nickel Boys” feels like the most exciting narrative debut since “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Then Ross tries something audacious that doesn’t quite work, and the experiment falls apart.

Building on the promise of 2018’s Oscar-nominated essay-doc “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” Ross presents “Nickel Boys” as a series of firsthand impressions: evocative sensory recollections of Elwood’s childhood, education and teenage activism, crushed but not killed by wrongful incarceration. The film puts us in Elwood’s place — it’s his POV that Ross privileges — with a variation on the empathy-building style pioneered by Terrence Malick in “The Tree of Life.”