Chalamet’s Boy too beautiful
Beautiful Boy (RP16, 112 mins) Directed by Felix Van Groeningen Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★1⁄2
In 2005, The New York Times Magazine published a moving and honest piece from writer David Sheff. My Addicted Son caused a small sensation and eventually led to a full memoir of Sheff’s years as parent to an addict. Beautiful Boy is an adaptation of that memoir.
Writer Luke Davies (Lion) and director Felix Van Groeningen (who made the astonishingly beautiful The Broken Circle Breakdown) have padded out and sanitised Sheff’s story a little. But Beautiful Boy is still a mostly worthy and intelligent look at meth and heroin addiction and particularly at how addiction can take hold in any strata of society.
You can argue that making a film about an addict who always has an affluent and loving family to return to, as David’s son Nick did, is a little like making a film of the Titanic but only showing the people who had access to the life boats. It’s a valid point. But I’ve seen the ‘‘authentic’’ and ‘‘brave’’ films about addiction that routinely make critics’ best-of lists. They are nearly unwatchable and change absolutely nothing.
And this cleaned-up and userfriendly tale of addiction does at least remind us of the sheer lunacy and cruelty of criminalising drug use and hence criminalising addiction. We might as well make fear and loneliness illegal. In fact, that is exactly what we have done.
Beautiful Boy is fairly unflinching about the mechanics of snorting and injecting. But it shies well away from showing us the physical toll. Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name) is not unconvincing as Nick, but never does he look like any modelling agency wouldn’t sign him up on sight. As Dad David, Steve Carell adds another decent line to his ‘‘straight roles’’ CV. Carell – when the slightly over-written dialogue allows – pretty much nails the collision of guilt and resentment of Sheff’s original article.
A cameo from Andre Royo, who played Bubbles in The Wire, only reminds us what an insulated experience of addiction Beautiful Boy represents.
The distractingly overcut and flashback-laden structure doesn’t serve a lot of purpose and often dissipates the tension and dread that a more conventional timeline might have allowed to build. Beautiful Boy is attractive and watchable. But considering the ugliness of its subject matter, I’m not sure that’s a recommendation.