CHICAGO — Director and co-writer RaMell Ross had his sights set on becoming an NBA guard and he came close to getting there, until injuries got in the way while he played for Georgetown University. He got somewhere else instead, working through some difficult times after his mother’s death while he was an undergraduate. He leaned into his artistic curiosity, his way of seeing things. He discovered literature, photography, a wide range of visual art.

At 42, with a supple 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary feature (“Hale County This Morning, This Evening”) already behind him, Ross is now a first-time feature filmmaker of immediate and rare distinction. He has made one of the 2024 American masterworks, alongside Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and Sean Baker’s “Anora”: “Nickel Boys.”

It’s based on Colson Whitehead’s novel, a different sort of masterwork inspired in amazing and awful ways by the real-life Dozier School for Boys, also known as the Florida School for Boys. It was state-sanctioned hell. The school operated with impunity as a reform institution and labor camp for young inmates, sealing countless, mostly Black fates at very young ages, and claiming nearly 100 lives across a bloody 20th century.

“Nickel Boys” offers not phony uplift, but truthful glimmers of hope and light in startling ways. Ross’ camera captures the specific, meticulously wrought first-person viewpoints of two fictional protagonists: teenaged Elwood (Ethan Herisse), wrongly convicted of a crime in the 1960s Jim Crow, civil rights-hostile South, and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who becomes Elwood’s lifeline inside the Nickel Academy and, later, outside its grip.

Ross came to Chicago last year for a Chicago International Film Festival screening of his film. More recently he won best director awards for “Nickel Boys” from various critics’ organizations, in Chicago, New York, Toronto and beyond. His script, co-adapted by Joslyn Barnes, has likewise won many awards, and seems certain to turn up in multiple Oscar nomination lists in January.

Our conversation, following the October Chicago screening, has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Once a year, if I’m lucky, I see a film that makes me sort of start holding my breath midway through, because I’m worried that whatever it’s doing, whatever magic trick it’s accomplishing, won’t last the whole way. But it does, the way “Nickel Boys” does. So. Thanks for pulling it off.

A: You’re welcome!

Q: I assume it didn’t come easily.

A: In some ways it did, in other ways it didn’t. I got COVID the first day. Directed for two days from a trailer. The production designer got it the second day. And then we lost the full week. So it ended up being a 30-day shoot, I believe, which was tough. The film is conceived as all one-ers (sustained, single-take shots) with a thousand different locations. Quite complex.

Q: How did the project come your way?

A: The rights to Colson’s book were held by Anonymous Content and Plan B, and they reached out in 2019 to Joslyn Barnes, who’s a collaborator of mine from “Hale County,” because they’d tried to contact me and in general I’m not very responsive. (laughs) We went to L.A. to see what they were interested in talking about. We had no idea beforehand. The book wasn’t published yet. They suggested we read it, and it kind of just went from there. Pretty fast process, honestly, from that meeting to when we had the script approved to going into production. People are like, “How’d you get that done so fast?” I don’t know. First time I’ve done this, so … I don’t know!

Q: Reading Whitehead’s novel, how quickly did you start throwing around different possibilities in your mind for how to film this story?

A: I like the way you worded that. Most people say “When did POV come to mind?” I’ve never read a book thinking about how to adapt it. It’s just not something I do. But when I read this one, the visuals came to mind early. With Colson, it’s writing that’s not overly descriptive but in the right ways, it’s explanatory. So there’s room to imagine. Maybe this is reductive, but I saw myself as Elwood, and as Turner, and that time period was so interesting to me anyway, because of all previous historical visualizations of it, and the platitudes that have become entrenched as history.

Q: Give me an example.

A: Well, there’s always a certain glow to a (historical) film, in the look, the costumes, everything. When I look at historical films, in which filmmakers are imagining the past, I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense but it looks like The Past. Which it is; it takes place there. But from the perspective of the people on screen, it was the present. So the question becomes, how do you make the film’s past feel like the present, as it’s happening, and not something that happened forever ago?

In my photography and my art practice, in “Hale County,” I have a certain way of making frames, and making cinema. I didn’t go to film school. I went to graduate school for photography (at the Rhode Island School of Design), so my first stop was point of view. It made the most sense to me. “Hale County” was essentially POV, so it made sense to think of “Nickel Boys” this way, and to think of how Elwood and Turner were seeing the world. And if you fully apply that to the narrative it’s conceptually clear. The narrative is so clear and strong and powerful to begin with.

Q: Where did you grow up?

A: Northern Virginia, in Burke. Military family. Born in Germany, lived in Chicago and Indiana for a time. Between 5 and 8, something like that. Up in the Fort Sheridan area. Then to Virginia.

I attribute most of whatever success it seems I have to having a super stable family, and having two parents who were deeply in love, and who over-loved their kids. “RaMell, you can do anything!” That’s what I heard, even when I couldn’t. But they sure didn’t tell me I couldn’t. For my sister and I, traveling around was tough. But all of us always had each other.

Q: Some reviews from your film’s festival circuit debut didn’t really go for the visual approach and the surprising points of view that we get in “Nickel Boys.” The word “gimmick” came up some, which to me seems completely off.

A: Do you spend any time on the internet, on TikTok and stuff? Cinema is not what it used to be. Most people don’t realize just how up for grabs cinema is right now. I think this film might actually be most powerful for 22- or 23-year-olds because everyone’s shooting POV on the internet now. That is the very nature of having the cellphone camera in your hand. Emotionally I think younger people can probably connect with “Nickel Boys” a lot easier than older generations, who might respond to it as a gimmick, and not as the literal language of the internet right now.

Q: Any new prospects now? What’s drawing your interest for the future?

A: You mean with film? I don’t really think in those terms, I guess. I’m open to offers. But my agent and my manager, which I just got, know that I’m a filmmaker who has, you know, certain ideas and I want to apply those to film. So, I’m not going to be reading scripts all week. I teach visual art at Brown, I’ve got my art stuff. Besides, the universe conspires against films from getting made.

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(Michael Phillips is the Chicago Tribune film critic.)

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