film review: beautiful boy

by bessie rubinstein

There’s a scene in Joan Didion’s autobiographical Year of Magical Thinking in which Didion visits her dying daughter Quintana in the ICU. Although the doctors are confounded by Quintana’s condition, and although prospects are bleak, Didion’s first thought upon arriving is,“It’s alright now. I’m here.” We feel like this with the ones we love; as long as we are together, things will be alright. When this comfortable certainty in togetherness is taken from us, it’s shattering. Quintana’s eventual death forces Didion to realize that are some things a parent’s love can’t fix. Being close isn’t always enough, though we wish it was that simple. In Beautiful Boy, Felix Van Groeningen’s screen adaptation of David Sheff’s memoir, Sheff tries to save his son from a ruining meth addiction only to come to the same devastating conclusion as Didion.

Beautiful Boy accomplishes a daunting task: the film brings a story about substance abuse to a mass audience without feeling, as a friend so scornfully predicted, like a “saccharine Hollywooded version” of addiction. To say that Beautiful Boy is timely would be an understatement. The Centers for Disease Control estimated that drug overdoses took the lives of 72,000 Americans in the past year; addiction narratives aren’t timely, they’re necessary. And one way to push a topic into the mainstream, as was the case with Brokeback Mountain, Dallas Buyers Club, Fruitvale Station, is to make a movie about it. Beautiful Boy isn’t shocking like Trainspotting, nor does it aim to disgust, to force the viewer to react viscerally to the ugly images of addiction, like Requiem for a Dream. The film is somewhat “Hollywooded”; my friend was right. There’s a brief romance between two beautiful, white college students, there’s the fact that Timothee Chalamet--the young Leo of the moment--is the face of the film. But Beautiful Boy’s Hollywooding is, in part, what allows it to be commercially successful movie about substance abuse. The movie casts a wide net by employing prodigal son Chalamet and familiar The Office favorite Steve Carrell--two actors palatable enough to attract masses to a topic that they’re otherwise uncomfortable or unfamiliar with.

And it’s making a point; as we watch Chalamet’s Nic Sheff and his father David, played by Carrell, struggle, we can’t help but wonder why. Nic has a loving, stable family, talent and six college acceptances, and most importantly, access to any and all treatment. And yet. The film is peppered with scenes like the one in which David pulls up to a dumpster in the pouring rain, collecting a vomiting Nic, who has run away from his treatment facility and used again. Beautiful Boy refuses to ascribe reason to a young man struggling at the hands of a disease from which his family cannot save him. The haunting “why” that Beautiful Boy will not, and cannot, answer is anchored in two honest performances by Chalamet and Carrell.

Timothee Chalamet certainly had something to do with the scorn my friend displayed for the movie. There is always the sneaking suspicion, when an actor as lauded as Chalamet plays a grueling role like this, that the film is less about the story and more about the actor’s ego. And after Chalamet’s streak last year--his major roles in Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name quickly rendered his Instagram account a hodge-podge of heart-eye emojis and comments from adolescent fans professing their love--I wondered whether Beautiful Boy would feel like a medium for Chalamet to show off his acting chops. Look, Mommy, I can play addiction! It’s a shame that the press circuit that comes with awards season will likely focus the conversation around Beautiful Boy on Chalamet’s experience playing an addict, because he does so with a caution and that suggests he knows that his performance isn’t the point.

Chalamet plays Nic with delicacy, not melodrama. He relies on little psychicalities--a blink, a swallow, a twitch--to portray Nic as a scared kid unwilling and unable to realize the scope of his problem. An exemplary scene for the subtleties of Chalamet’s performance is one in which Nic sits alone in his dark bedroom, journaling. “You never leave this room,” his father points out. Carrell’s face fills the frame, Nic’s Nirvana poster in the background. It’s a surly scene we’re all familiar with--a parent reaching out to their moody teen who just wants to be left alone. Chalamet keeps his face, so delicate it’s almost feminine, guarded and impenetrable. Eyes down, mouth taut. “It’ll pass,” says David. “The feeling of being alienated. And isolated.” Carrell delivers the line with too much tenderness for Nic to bear. “That really helps. Thanks for the advice, Dad,” Nic mumbles back sarcastically. The words barely leak from Chalamet’s tense lips. David’s been dismissed. “Wait, that came out wrong.” Chalamet’s voice, higher than before, vulnerable, gives David pause, but he leaves anyway.

Suddenly, Nic’s composure--his comfort and confidence in his isolation--breaks.Chalamet looks up, blinking nervously and swallowing with some effort. He twitches his forehead. Nic is trying to shrug off this moment as angst, trying to fit the narrative that the Nirvana poster and dim bedroom imply, but Chalamet’s physical choices give Nic away. He’s nervous. He knows, perhaps, that he’s facing a swallowing force. He knows that he’s going to need his dad.

David is frantic to meet that need. The distress with which Carrell plays David, most painfully present when he utters simple, quiet lines like “Can you help him?” or “Have you seen my son?” called to mind the feeling of utter helplessness that Didion so achingly expresses. If Chalamet’s care and sincerity in his work save the film from being an exploitation of addiction, it’s Carrell’s gentle desperation that finishes the job and makes the movie genuine. My heart swelled and broke as I watched Carrell’s David fall back on the journalistic methods that so serve him in his career (he researches meth, interviews addicts, even tries hard drugs himself) only to discover what those who fight with addiction already know: that there’s no strategy, no matter how diligently executed, guaranteed to yield recovery. The film jumps around chronologically, perhaps to indicate the nonlinear nature of healing, and so it’s the character arc Carrell crafts for David which orients us. Nic’s journey is muddy; it’s difficult to tell where in the story we are as he goes through bouts of progression and relapse, stability and chaos. But we can follow David’s trajectory as Carrell takes him from the father who can walk out of the bedroom to the anguished man whose life is consumed by the singular goal of saving his son--and finally, to the man who reminded me so much of Didion. The man who comes to the nauseating conclusion that there’s nothing more he can do to rescue Nic.

The text that flashes on the screen after Beautiful Boy’s end is hopeful. The real Nic Sheff has been clean for almost 8 years; he’s had the chance to heal, to explore his talent and become a successful TV writer, to fall in love. I almost wish Van Groeningen hadn’t included this epilogue. It neatly wraps up and puts a bow on a narrative about a problem which the rest of the film seem to argue cannot be neatly wrapped up. But this is one of a few weaknesses in a film that otherwise navigates the murkiness of telling somebody’s story without appropriating it for box office success. Beautiful Boy takes no indulgence in its portrayal of drug use, instead utilizing familiar actors and reigned-in performances to frame addiction not as an otherworldly tragedy, but as something intimate and all-too-real.

Bessie Rubinstein | @downbessie