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.