"The Nickel Children" is a lament for runaway kids falling into hopeless lives of prostitution. Eschewing exploitation, irector Glenn Klinker and scribe Eric Litra are intent on capturing the tragedy -- but pic slips into a numbing monotone of various shades of black. A daisy chain of scenes for strong actors to deliver monologues makes item more apt for fests than commercial venues.As 14-year-old street urchins and prostitutes, Tamara Hope's Cat and Reiley McClendon's Nolan scrape by, trying to survive as supports for each other. Pic is least mannered and melodramatic when focused on these talented young thesps shifting between streetwise and a vulnerability that reveals spirits on the verge of permanently breaking.
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Nolan is unable to pick safe customers; Cat is skilled at keeping her clients at an emotional distance. Outside of Cat's older hooker friend Beatrice (Marsha Thomason), only Feedo (Tom Sizemore), kindly manager of the fleabag motel where the kids hole up, has any concern for Cat and Nolan.
Finding Beatrice murdered in the motel room, Cat faints while giving her statement to the police and ends up being treated in a hospital by a sensitive doctor (Jeremy Sisto), who informs her she's pregnant. Still, Cat can't seem to turn off her seduction technique with the doc, and as he reels in confusion, she flees from the hospital in an evening dress Nolan has stolen.
Such frenetic plotting, capped by the pair's desperate measures to get the cash to pay for two bus tickets to Toronto, feels at odds with the pic's concerns for creating the mood of street-bound characters reflecting on their lives.
Grim downhill slide isn't helped by a third act that's far too beholden to the finale of "Midnight Cowboy," and hobbled further by an unconvincing denouement for Cat, whose home life is pointlessly vague.
In his first bigscreen appearance since his various domestic and personal dramas, Sizemore exudes the frustrations of a thoughtful man in a dead-end life. Sisto's doc hints at a character worthy of his own, perhaps more interesting movie.
Pic, lensed on film, unspooled at Method Fest in a telecine print that dampened the richness of d.p. John S. Bartley's color palette. Klinker's knack for framing at off-angles grows more annoying by the reel.
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