Shia hell! LaBeouf brings his abusive father vividly to life
Honey Boy (15) Verdict: Tough but compelling ★★★★✩
AFEW months ago, I reviewed a sweet film called The Peanut Butter Falcon, in which Shia LaBeouf plays a loner whose friendship with a young man with Down’s Syndrome helps to rid him of some personal demons.
Off screen, however, LaBeouf’s own demons were intact. During the making of that picture, he was arrested following a booze-fuelled altercation with a cop.
There had been many similar episodes before. But this time he went into rehab, and as a form of therapy wrote a screenplay about the relationship he’d had as a child actor with his abusive, narcissistic father. That was the origin of Honey Boy, which is only mildly fictionalised.
LaBeouf renames himself Otis
Lort, and plays Otis’s father, James. So in all but name he is playing his own father. Capably directed by Alma Har’el, Honey Boy is essentially a cinematic expression of Philip Larkin’s famous poem, which needs slight paraphrasing here, about how your parents muck you up. The film begins in 2005. Otis (Lucas Hedges, the go-to actor for all troubled young men) is 22 and an established screen actor, but in emotional tumult. HE
IS addicted to alcohol, prone to drunken rages, and deeply unhappy, yet he seems to revel in that unhappiness. This makes the film sound irredeemably grim, and it isn’t. Most of the drama takes place in 1995 when Otis is 12 (and played, quite wonderfully, by young British actor Noah Jupe). He is bright and loveable, not yet driven to dysfunctional behaviour himself, though the seeds are there. He manifestly loves his father, a former rodeo clown who can’t find work because of his criminal record, so Otis employs him as a chaperone out of his modest screen earnings.
He is not afraid to stand up to him, but never knows when James will turn violent. His behaviour has already driven Otis’s mother away, and there is a funny but heartrending scene when the boy mediates on the phone between his parents.
Otis finds some comfort — and early sexual initiation — from an older girl who lives in the same cheap motel. But James undermines that relationship, and assaults a kind man assigned to Otis in a mentor programme arranged by his absent mother.
It’s powerful stuff, brilliantly acted, and of course it is LaBeouf’s show, but the film also represents another extravagant feather in the cap of young Jupe, who is carving out quite a career since grabbing attention in the TV drama The Night Manager.
Let’s hope he understands the pitfalls awaiting successful child actors. It’s not just unstable parents who can lead them astray.