Butler's Cinema Scene

Timothee Chalamet, Steve Carell

“BEAUTIFUL BOY” My rating: B

120 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Drug addiction movies are a bit like Holocaust movies.

Even if the film is well made, the subject matter is tremendously off-putting and depressing. It takes something remarkable, a new way of looking at the topic, to make the painful bearable.

“Beautiful Boy” comes close. It is based on journalist David Sheff’s memoir of dealing with his son Nic’s addiction, as well as a second memoir by Nic.  There’s little emphasis here on the usual tropes of the genre…back-alley drug buys, spoons and needles, withdrawal agonies.

Instead the film puts a parent’s horror and anxiety front and center, and by doing so it forces every viewer — or at least those with children — to question how they would deal with a similar situation.

Coddle? Criticize? Wash your hands of an uncontrollable child?

At various points in Felix Van Groeningen’s film, all those options are examined. And it helps immeasurably that the film stars Steve Carell as the elder Sheff and the ever-resourceful Timothy Chalamet as his tormented son, Nic.

The  screenplay by Van Groningen and Luke Davis cleverly juggles its time frame, opening with a conversation between the deeply concerned David and a drug counselor and then employing a series of jumbled flashbacks to tell the story of this father and son.

A narratively straightforward, step-by-step depiction of young Nic’s descent into depravity might be too much to handle; by zigging and zagging between the family’s homey past and its uncomfortable present, the film offers an emotional buffer between the audience and the film’s inescapable angst.

Steve Carell

Initially, at least, Nic (portrayed as a child by Kue Lawrence and Jack Dylan Grazer) is indeed beautiful, a happy, charming, inquisitive being.  It looks as though he’s going to have one of those blessed lives — beloved of his father, stepmother Karen (Maura Tierney) and two young step-siblings, accepted by all six colleges he applies to. It’s damn near an idyllic existence.

The film doesn’t depict how Nic becomes addicted; we learn of the situation the same way David and Karen do, by wondering why the kid goes missing for days on end. When he does show up Nic is evasive and fuzzy-headed; when the questions go too deep, he turns angry and resentful.

Repeatedly David, a freelance journalist, ventures forth from the family’s North California home to San Francisco, where he patrols the streets of the Tenderloin hoping to find and rescue his missing boy.

Stints in rehab seem to work…for a little while. Told by a specialist that “Relapse is part of the learning process,” an irate  David replies that this is like saying that crashing is part of pilot’s training.

Why does Nic use? He tells  his father that when he uses drugs the world is in Technicolor. But clearly his emotional and mental  issues run deep; in one group therapy session Nic acknowledges that drugs aren’t the problem…drugs are how he’s attempting to cope with the problem.

But the film never stoops to armchair psychology; it suggests that the reasons behind an individual’s addiction may be unknowable.

Mostly it concentrates on how a family deals with the situation, and it’s here that “Beautiful Boy” turns heartbreaking.

David loves his son to pieces, and it takes a while to realize that nothing he can do will actually change anything. Eventually he must accept that some people cannot be saved. He can only hope that Nic is not one of them.

If I have a major criticism of the film it’s that it may is too beautiful. The gorgeous landscape in which the Sheff family lives, Ruben Impens’ luscious cinematography, at times threaten to undermine the film’s serious intentions. Perhaps something more overtly documentary would be better.

But the players are terrific.  Usually known for his comedy roles, Carell is devastating as a father being yanked in several directions, while Chalament nails both Nic’s innocent charm and his drug-fuelled conniving.

| Robert W. Butler