Beautiful Boy, the film, is based on twin memoirs by a father and son, titled Beautiful Boy ($5.18 on amazon right now) and Tweak, respectively, of the latter’s long struggle with drug addiction, especially to crystal meth. It’s by turns a bleak portrayal of the effects a child’s addiction can have on the family and a distant, almost toneless depiction of what should be a gut-wrenching subject, saved primarily by yet another star turn by Timothée Chalamet as the son in the one great performance in the film.

Steve Carell co-stars as David Sheff, the father in the story, looking very paternal, as a successful journalist who is surprised to find out that his son has a serious drug problem and tries to throw himself at the issue to solve it. His son, Nicholas, behaves as you might expect an addict to behave – lying, stealing, deceiving, and then collapsing in apology and self-loathing. The cycle repeats multiple times until Nicholas eventually overdoses in New York, the event that more or less closes the movie and in real life marked the start of his journey to sobriety.

My experiences with this kind of addiction are mostly through depictions in writing and on screen; I had one relative who dealt with it, hiding it from me for most of my life, until the last few years before his suicide when he was probably no longer capable of the deception required. So when I say I think Beautiful Boy does a solid job of showing Nicholas’ addiction, and his up-and-down cycle through rehab, recovery, and relapse, or that I think the way his disease tears his family up is accurately portrayed, bear in mind that I’m playing with a handicap here.

But the rest of the script feels heavy-handed and even one-sided. Nicholas’ mother (Amy Ryan) lives in LA and is only on screen a few times, but the character is a shrew, and the fact that she takes care of Nicholas for about a year when he’s clean is brushed under the rug so she can fall apart again on the phone when he relapses after a weekend of visiting David. David’s second wife, Karen (Maura Tierney), is an artist, the mother of Nicholas’ two step-siblings, and is something of a cipher of a character, given more screen time but no development. There’s one scene near the end where she takes action after years of watching the damaging David-Nicholas dynamic, a wordless sequence that is the best thing any woman gets to do in the film – but that just speaks to how little the script regards its women, and I can’t believe that neither Nicholas’ mother nor his stepmother was that important in his early life or his path through addiction.

Chalamet is superb, again, probably earning his second Oscar nomination in as many years for this performance; he physically fits the part, looking a little haggard for someone with such a young face, earning the plaudits every time Nicholas experiences moments of clarity and remorse. It’s Carell who disappoints here – he looks right, but he’s just inert in this performance, and I found myself without any emotional connection to his character, even though I am a father myself and should at least have felt that paternal anxiety and grief through his eyes. If David Sheff is just a bottled-up guy, maybe Carell’s performance would make a little more sense, but it doesn’t translate well on screen. I needed a lot more here to feel what the character was feeling and didn’t get it.

There’s also a bunch of stuff in Beautiful Boy that a decent editor would have clipped – the weird, incongruous sex scene between Nicholas and a girl he hooks up with late in the movie served no purpose, and I’m not sure why we saw Karen working on her art at all – and the flashbacks to Nicholas’ youth aren’t well integrated into the primary narrative. Andre Royo has a nice bit part as Nicholas’ sponsor in NA, a fun bit of casting for viewers who remember him as Bubs on The Wire, but the fact that he’s so little used in the story also points to how little we see of Nicholas’ time in those meetings or in the process. There is one little fact delivered toward the end of the film by a doctor played by Timothy Hutton, where he explains to David that the rehab facility director lied to him about success rates of rehab from meth addiction – that the success rate tends to be in the single digits because meth damages the user’s nerve endings. Nothing shook me in this script more than that scene; even I, someone generally empathetic to addicts because I understand it’s a disease and saw it lead to the suicide of a loved one, didn’t quite understand just how brutal it could be. Nicholas Sheff recovered, and is still alive today, working, writing, and living a life that was probably unimaginable for him or his father during the time covered in Beautiful Boy. That miracle needed to come across more in the film.

One postscript: Nic Sheff did an interview with The Fix where he praised the film and Chalamet’s performance in it. It’s worth reading even if you have no interest in the movie.

First Man reunites director Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling, who worked together two years ago on La La Land, in a different sort of movie, this time a serious biopic that deals with the biggest themes possible – life, death, and man’s search for meaning. Ostensibly a biography of Neil Armstrong from the death of his young daughter from cancer to his landing on the moon, First Man is much more a story of grief and coping, or not coping, and as a result less insightful as any sort of document of the man himself.

Gosling plays Armstrong, whom we first meet as an engineer and Navy pilot whose two-year-old daughter Karen is seriously ill with a brain tumor that will claim her life (via daughter) very early in the film, after which Armstrong shows the only real emotion he will display anywhere during the course of the movie. The story follows him through his entry into the space program, flight testing, and training, eventually to his selection for Apollo 11, but his path involves living through the deaths of at least five colleagues due to crashes and the cabin fire on the Apollo 1 craft, only furthering Armstrong’s turn inward with its constant reminder of Karen’s death. Armstrong also distances himself from his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), and two young sons, burying himself in work rather than risking further grief by getting too close to anyone else in his life.

First Man is extremely loud and incredibly close, to the point where the sound editing and cinematography, while perhaps accurate for the subject matter, make it hard to watch in several parts. The scenes aboard the various spacecraft involve a tremendous amount of shaking – not just showing us that the people on the ships are shaking, but shaking the camera so much that I repeatedly had to turn away from the screen, something I can’t remember ever doing for another film. The sound in those scenes where Armstrong is aboard any sort of ship is also mixed so that the background noise is amplified and it’s very hard to understand any of the communications between Armstrong (and any colleagues) and Mission Control; I eventually just gave up on understanding that dialogue, much of which involved technical chatter.

Gosling and Foy dominate the movie both in screen time and with their performances, with Gosling making Armstrong almost unknowable with his restrained portrayal, at times painful in his reticence and utter refusal to show emotion. There’s a pivotal scene where Janet forces him to talk to his two sons before he leaves for the Apollo 11 mission, knowing there was a good chance he wouldn’t return, and he can barely talk to the boys or even look at them; when one son asks if he might not come home, Armstrong responds as if he’s still in a press conference, with Gosling barely making eye contact and answering with a robotic tone and cadence. Foy gets to show a broader range of emotions, and her character develops some strength over the course of the film, enhanced by how her character is dressed and Foy’s own waifish appearance.

The movie has disappointed at the box office – much to the glee of alt-right trolls upset over the absence of a scene where the American flag is planted on the moon, which would be so out of place given the context of what Armstrong actually does after he lands – and I think one reason might be that the movie isn’t just a biopic. There is some celebration of space exploration here, and certainly some jingoism involved as the U.S. reached the moon before the Soviets could, but the larger theme in First Man is death and how we cope with it. The script’s premise is that Karen’s death changed Armstrong forever, leading him to create distance between himself and his family while driving him to take bigger risks at work, including accepting the riskiest mission in the history of the space program. (As a side note, I enjoyed watching Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and The Pin flying to the moon.) Rather than fully explaining his character, though, the script instead shows a man unwilling to open up to anyone in his grief, and the damage that ultimately does to him, to his marriage, and to his relationships with his two surviving children. Perhaps audiences wanted to see more of a hero at the heart of the film – there are a few such moments, but it’s not the dominant tone – and were surprised to see a movie that is so somber and pensive about a topic just about nobody wants to spend any time considering. That theme, and that choice to go with that theme over a rah-rah space and ‘merica tone, makes First Man a stronger film even if it’s less commercially appealing.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is based on the true story of biographer and literary forger Lee Israel, who discovered she had a knack for mimicking the style of famous authors and began producing fake personal correspondence from the likes of Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker when her own books stopped selling. With two strong performances by Melissa McCarthy and Richard Grant, the film bounces along at a brisk pace, running from the nadir of Israel’s legitimate career through her forgery streak to her eventual trial, but the script itself is flimsy and does way too much to try to make a remorseless con artist into a sympathetic character.

McCarthy plays Israel, a frumpy, mid-50s author who drinks too much and doesn’t really care for people, and whose agent, played by Jane Curtin, has lost interest in working with her between her difficult personality and the lack of commercial appeal of her books. We see her lose an editing job, struggle to pay bills, and experience writer’s block (presaged in one of the many heavyhanded scenes in the movie), before she eventually meets Jack Hock, played by Grant, a flamboyant gay libertine who becomes her one friend and eventually a partner in her crimes. While researching her latest book idea, on comedienne Fanny Brice, she finds a real letter from Brice tucked in a library book, steals and sells it, and hits on the idea of forging letters for profit. Eventually, she’ll be caught, giving McCarthy a scene for her Oscar reel at the sentencing hearing, and hits on the idea of writing a memoir of her stint as a forger both as a way to make money and to satisfy her inner desire to write.

The story is just too light and way too kind to its main character to work. It does show Israel as difficult and often rude to others, but the depiction of her forgery sales gives off the sense that, hey, it’s all okay because she’s just selling stuff that wealthy idiots will buy, and that the independent bookstores who buy her letters to resell them are somehow complicit for their failure to verify that her letters are authentic. Because it’s based on Israel’s memoir, there’s no attempt to explain why she is the way she is – why she drinks so much, why she likes cats more than people (her words), why she can’t maintain romantic relationships, and so on. And that means we don’t learn anything about why she slides so easily into forgery, other than that she had a financial need and then realized she was good at it. There’s zero sense that she regrets any of this, or considers that there might be consequences for the other people she involves, including Jack, and the script doesn’t even try to explain how she ended up without scruples.

McCarthy and Grant are both tremendous in their respective characters and in all of their scenes together, an odd couple of misfit friends, neither of whom has anyone else close to them. Late in the film, Israel’s previous girlfriend appears in a confessional scene, although it merely rehashes what we already knew about Lee’s character – she can’t open up, she creates walls between herself and people who try to get close to her – without explaining any of why. That somewhat limits what McCarthy can do in the role, but given its constraints she goes to an extraordinary length to try to give the character some three-dimensional qualities and create empathy for Israel, even when it’s probably not deserved. Grant makes Hock a delightful scamp, a bit ridiculous at points, but both consistently entertaining and a better elicitor of pathos for the character than McCarthy can be with Israel, as his character is more of an open mess while Israel is a closed one.

There’s already a consensus forming around Grant as a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and McCarthy probably has a shot at a Best Actress nod, although that might depend a bit on how many voters actually see this movie. She deserves plaudits for easily transitioning from comedic roles that rely on her timing and her gift with physical comedy to a dramatic one where none of those comic skills come into play. It’s the script itself that’s the problem – this is a trifle of a story, told from the perspective of the main character, someone who had every reason to lie about herself and who had an actual history of lying. Some insight on her character would have gone a long way to justifying the film, but we get none of that and too much of the drama around her friendship with Jack and her forging career. It makes for an unsatisfying product beneath the two superb performances that sit on top of the film.