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Elwood Curtis’s dream of going to college is shattered along a two-lane Florida highway. The victim of an innocent misstep, he is sentenced to the hell of Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory buried in the heart of the Jim Crow South. He meets another ward, Turner, who has seen it all. The two black teenagers form an alliance: Turner offers basic survival advice while Elwood clings to his optimistic worldview. Against the backdrop of the burgeoning civil rights movement, Elwood and Turner’s existence seems light years away from the polite eloquence of the Reverend Martin Luther King. Despite Nickel’s brutality, Elwood struggles to retain his humanity, awakening a new vision for Turner.