During a flashback in director Felix van Groeningen‘s new film, Beautiful Boy, Steve Carell’s character, David Sheff, tries to comfort his young son, Nic (who is played by Kue Lawrence here, but Timothée Chalamet for most of the film). Worried that his father’s obligation to send him to Los Angeles to spend the holiday with his mother (Amy Ryan) is a punishment, David reassures him that, no matter what, he loves him more than “everything” in the world. In that moment, the gesture is very sweet, but David’s memory of that sad little boy in the airport is precisely what makes it so difficult to come to terms with his son’s addiction later in life.
Van Groeningen and Luke Davies adapted the script from the real-life Sheffs’ memoir of the same title and while Nic’s struggles with addiction drive the film’s emotional beats, it’s really David’s story. Carell has seemed desperate for an Oscar since he left The Office, so it’s easy to understand why this project appealed to him. This is a story about a parent coming to terms with their child’s flaws and struggling to understand their role–real or not–in that child’s addiction and Carell does a lot of subtle, impactful work throughout.
Part of David’s reaction is based in shame. He clearly fears that Nic’s addiction is a result of some failure on his part as a parent, but he’s also unable to convey that openly. Instead, Carell expresses that worry through passive aggression and denial. David’s approach to Nic’s addiction is largely clinical, a journalist for Rolling Stone at the time, he approaches it like a story, something he must research and understand.
When Nic decides he needs to go stay in rehab rather than go to college, David struggles not to argue. There and elsewhere, Carell walks a line between portraying David’s honest desire to do what’s best for his son and making the audience understand that David’s love makes him blind to what actually is best for Nic. To his credit, Carell never seems to criticize Sheff through his performance, but David makes the same mistakes again and again, it’s hard not to become frustrated with him as a viewer and feel the film growing repetitive as a result.
Still, strong as Carell’s performance is, David’s reactions might not come off as anything but justified concern if Chalamet’s performance didn’t show how much what David says affects Nic’s attempts to stay sober. Chalamet showed audiences how beautifully he can convey a character’s devastation in the credits sequence of last year’s Call Me by Your Name and he does it over and over here. Anytime Carell plays David’s gentle disappointment, we see on Chalamet’s face how much it crushes Nic.
However, good as Chalamet is, he doesn’t actually have a lot to do. Nic is supposed to be high for much of Chalamet’s screentime. While it is tough to watch someone so young and indeed, beautiful, so effectively recreate the anxious, desperate energy of someone with a severe addiction, it’s hard not to imagine how much more he would have been able to do if the film were about Nic rather than David.
Chalamet does get a handful of scenes where he plays Nic pre-addiction or in his brief sober periods, but because the movie is more focused on David’s reaction and numerous memories of young Nic, he can’t really track Nic’s arc. So, it can be difficult to read Nic’s struggles to stay sober as his own story. Rather, his relapses and the possibly permanent damage the drugs to his mind feel like David’s losses. Nic is little more than a plot point generator.
Though reducing Nic to a caricature of addiction was clearly not the film’s intention, it’s difficult not to read its approach to what is technically his story as problematic. At the beginning, the film manages to feel both sentimental and realistic, but it becomes more cloying and more queasily exploitative as the film goes on. Much of that is thanks to the music.
To put it bluntly, Beautiful Boy can often feel like a nearly two-hour music video, with each major moment or emotional beat scored by a popular song meant to heighten the emotions. Used sparingly, it would be effective, but each choice feels more emotionally manipulative than the last and by the end, the choices can feel like parody. It’s acceptable (and perhaps inevitable) that John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” would score a scene, but another, where Perry Como’s version of “Sunrise, Sunset” plays is almost laughably on-the-nose. By the time the film ends with title cards preaching about America’s drug crisis, it’s hard to ignore the sense that Beautiful Boy isn’t just a very well-made after-school special.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to explore the ways addiction can affect the family and friends of those who are addicted. Perhaps making more art about the right ways to help those struggling to survive it is part of fighting the problem. Maybe that’s Beautiful Boy‘s intention, but it doesn’t handle the subject or the people it’s based on with the complexity they deserve.
In the end, the film is just another maudlin depiction of drug addiction. It may not have the hyperbolic emotional blow-ups that usually characterize the genre, but it’s just as emotionally manipulative and worse, it treats the addict at its center like just a problem in someone’s life. Nic may be someone’s everything, but that doesn’t mean he should have to sacrifice his own story to them.
Rating: 6.5/10
