“Nickel Boys” is 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. It’s based on the real-life horrors perpetrated at the Dozier School for Boys across its ignoble 111-year history.

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 nearby 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.

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.

In broad terms the first part of the film is shown through the eyes of Elwood, beginning with the boy lying on the grass. 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).

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

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.”

(“Nickel Boys” contains thematic material involving racism, some strong language including racial slurs, violent content and smoking)

‘NICKEL BOYS’

Rated PG-13. At the Landmark Kendall Square Cinema, Coolidge Corner Theatre and AMC Boston Common.

Grade: A