Beautiful Boy ★★★½
TWO major films released in 2018 looked at the physical and emotional toll of drug addiction.
Coincidentally, both Ben is Back and Beautiful Boy are as much about the impact on parents as they are on the young man living and suffering through the addiction.
Both films are sensitively told and pack an emotional punch but are different enough to warrant watching in their own right as cautionary tales that build understanding of circumstances while not judging individuals.
I’ve previously reviewed Ben is Back which stars Lucas Hedges and Julia Roberts. It’s a very good film and so is Beautiful Boy.
The latter is based on the separate, published memoirs by David Sheff and his son Nic. Their wonderfully close bond was tested to the extreme when Nic succumbed to a drug spiral involving marijuana, ecstacy, cocaine, LSD and eventually crystal meth.
There is a sequence in the film where Nic’s journey from a bright, young 18-year-old to 20-something ravaged hospital inmate is documented in his diary which David leafs through and discovers an alarming and depressing progression from clear to incoherent thought.
During his relatively quick decline Nic drops out of college, loses a girlfriend, alienates his entire family and subjects his body and brain to constant and potentially irrepairable damage.
Along the way, David also goes on a journey of discovery that forces him to confront the stark truths that some drugs render the user incapable of taking part in normal rehabilitation programs and, even more profoundly, that the only person who can successfully save Nic from death is Nic himself.
Belgian director Felix van Groeningen came to the attention of critics in 2012 with the festival circuit hit The Broken Circle Breakdown and he brings both sensitivity and visual style to Beautiful Boy, particularly with the many vignettes showing the previous deep bond between father and son.
Van Groeningen also adapted the novels for the screen with the assistance of Luke Davies who also scripted the excellent 2016 Australian film Lion.
Performances across the board as very good with Timothy Chalamet as Nic and Steve Carel as David, cementing their talents in dramatic roles, despite being at different stages in their careers.
Maura Tierney is also strong as Nic’s step-mother Karen and has a particularly telling scene where she follows Nic in her car, eventually giving in to despair.
In contrast to many films about drug addiction, Beautiful Boy manages to provide some answers, however brutally honest they might be.