Review: Beautiful Boy

Beautiful Boy (15)

USA 2018 120 mins  Dir: Felix Van Groeningen  Cast: Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet, Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan

Taking its title from the song John Lennon wrote for his second son Sean, this true-life awards season downer is a blend of junkie flick and middle-class parental anxiety drama based on books written by each of the father and son protagonists. As one might expect, it’s quite a showcase for the emoting abilities of its leads. Call Me by Your Name star Timothée Chalamet gets the titular role as the intelligent, privileged, handsome, tousle-haired youth who develops a dangerous fondness for crystal meth. Steve Carell, meanwhile, does doleful and bearded as his caring, despairing dad. This proves handy for the viewer when the film hops about in time, because we can tell where we are by how salt’n’peppery he is. Alas, as a contribution to the over-stuffed ‘addiction and recovery’ genre, the film has few fresh insights to offer.

David Sheff (Carell) is obviously doing well for himself in the freelance writing game, as he resides in a sun-drenched Marin County idyll with his second wife Karen (Tierney), their two kids and his teenage son, Nic (Chalamet), from his first marriage to Vicki (Ryan). With all his advantages, Nic has a bright future ahead of him. But there’s trouble in paradise. He’s got a Nirvana poster on his bedroom wall and likes to read Charles Bukowski out loud at school, much to the delight of the class Dangerous Girl, so is clearly destined to wind up in the gutter with a needle hanging out of his arm.

This isn’t the only heavy-handedness in Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen’s English-language debut. The whole thing is swathed in mood-setting music performing the function of emotional heavy lifting, as though the cast aren’t trusted to deliver on this: Bowie, Mogwai, Tim Buckley, Massive Attack, Sigur Ros, Nirvana, Neil Young (Heart of Gold, strangely enough, rather than Tonight’s the Night), er, Perry Como. A doctor pops up to explain helpfully how crystal meth alters brain chemistry, making recovery from addiction more than usually challenging. And a counsellor reveals early on that “relapse is part of the learning process”, as if to set out the narrative structure. So when Nic starts playing happy families about an hour in, we anticipate that he’ll be a slack-jawed zombie cooking up smack before long.

Although this is told primarily from distraught David’s perspective, Chalamet’s Nic makes the biggest impact as he flips from charming and easygoing to angry, devious and manipulative in familiar junkie style, cruelly exploiting his father’s desire to see him clean up. But the film’s relentless flashbacks actually work against both actors as it struggles to maintain emotional momentum.

Anyone craving a Just Say No moment warning of the horrible consequences of hard drugs should look no further than the scene in which David purchases some powder from a street vendor, possibly in the spirit of journalistic enquiry or simply in a risky attempt to understand his son’s addiction. Horrifically, this causes him to get agitated and listen to free jazz. No one should have to go through that.