Carell, Chalamet ground a pair of addiction memoirs
The words cannot be easy to hear as an addict, or as the parent of an addict.
“Relapse is a part of recovery,” a clinic worker says to a distraught David Sheff, played by Steve Carell in the new film “Beautiful Boy.” David’s bright, unravelling son, Nic, played by Timothee Chalamet, has begun to face his addictions head-on.
But on the road to success — in real life, Nic Sheff, now 36, has been sober for eight years — failures lurk around every corner, along with chemical demons. Methamphetamines are the worst for Nic, but he uses all kinds of drugs, including heroin. He disappears for days on end. David and his LA-based mother, Vicki (Amy Ryan), and Marin County, Calif., artist stepmother, Karen (Maura Tierney), don’t always know when, or how, to let the cycle play out, and when to attempt another rescue. Life becomes a painful, sun-dappled uncertainty.
The movie comes from two memoirs: “Tweak” (2007) by Nic Sheff and “Beautiful Boy” (2008) by David Sheff. It’s a tricky and largely successful back-and-forth, this adaptation written by the director, Felix van Groeningen, and his cowriter Luke Davies. If you come away from “Beautiful Boy” sorting through what feels real and true and what feels contrived, it’s a matter of directorial style more than the raw material. The Belgian van Groeningen, making his English-language debut, frames the lushly idyllic Marin County exteriors like Eden, and cinematographer Ruben Impens pours on the gorgeous light and colour.
The look has its suffocating side; so does the way van Groeningen lays on a heavy blanket of metaphorically obvious music, from John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” (well, that one’s a gimme) to David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” to Sigur Ros. The montages, the interweave of flashbacks serve as artful flourishes, as they did in van Groeningen’s best-known earlier film, “The Broken Circle Breakdown,” another drama of a creative family in crisis.
The simple two-person scenes work best. The tense coffee shop reunion between Carell and Chalamet stands out. Even without the addiction theme, most any parent can recognize the push/pull between Nic (feeling guilty, hiding something, alternately hostile and heartbroken) and David (ineffectual, exhausted, placating, sincere). Scenes like this, usually reserved for the male leads, become the movie’s lifeline. This is where the actors can cut through the film’s self-conscious techniques of engagement, and focus on their own.
Chalamet’s terrific throughout, accessing and deploying every kind of emotion in unpredictable combinations. It’s an ideal followup for him, coming after his Oscar-nominated turn in the languidly beautiful romance “Call Me By Your Name.” The role of Nic calls for sharp edges and a hurtling, dangerous momentum toward destinations unknown, and Chalamet seizes the day.
Carell has the more immediately sympathetic role, though one of the strengths of “Beautiful Boy” is its refusal to ennoble this pleasant, diffident writer-father, too preoccupied to see what’s happening to his son as it’s happening. Carell has a nearly bottomless well of likability on screen, which gives him license to play against his natural comic appeal. There are times, though, when van Groeningen either nudges or simply allows Carell to go for broke emotionally, not always to a difficult scene’s advantage.
A lot of “Beautiful Boy” is necessarily hard to take, though the script softens the roughest of Nic’s travails. Is this why the movie’s anguish feels more indicated than inhabited? Still: You can’t fault the performers much. Or Chalamet, at all.