Beautiful Boy

UK Release Date. 18 January 2019
Certification. 15
Running Time. 2 hours 
Director. Felix van Groeningen
Cast. Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet, Amy Ryan, Maura Tierney.
Rating. 60%

Review.

Drug addiction is a challenging subject matter to depict on screen. An inherently insidious, internal disease, the end result is frequently a film that tackles the physical or mental health angle of addiction. These films that earnestly depict the same sorts of manifestations of the damage addiction may cause, all too often, result in long-standing cinematic clichés. 

Felix Van Groningen's Beautiful Boy mostly avoids these familiar tropes, instead depicting one young man's struggles with methamphetamine and the extent to which addiction affects immediate family. The film's depiction of addiction, and its cyclical nature, provides a genuine examination of how drugs permeate and infect family relationships.

Beautiful Boy is based on what is effectively a complimentary set of memoirs from father and son writers, David and Nic Sheff - Beautiful Boy: A father's journey through his son's addiction and Tweak: Growing up on methamphetamines.

Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet are cast in the roles of father and son, David and Nic Sheff. Steve Carell delivers an honest and understated performance as the parent struggling to comprehend but nonetheless trying to pull his son back from the brink, over and over again, with increasingly fruitless results. Beautiful Boy is told predominantly from David's perspective.

Supporting cast members include Amy Ryan as Vicki, David's first wife and Maura Tierney as David's second wife, Karen, and the mother of his two much younger children. Whilst Karen is sympathetic toward Nic, there is an underlying frustration in the manner in which David neglects his second family for an increasingly destructive father-son relationship. But in truth, both these highly talented actresses are woefully under-employed in severely underwritten roles.

Beautiful Boy's non-linear narrative all too often strips the story of its potential power and needless flashbacks repeatedly take us out of the moment. The film, however, does open with a wonderfully produced establishment scene accompanied by the suitably anthemic Helicon 1. This is sadly not in keeping with the remainder of the film, however, as all too often, Beautiful Boy relies on painfully blunt and literal song selections to punctuate a scene or express what a character is feeling. The film's soundtrack goes beyond commenting on the action to actively distracting from it.

Whilst Beautiful Boy solemnly attempts to show the lengths a father is willing to go to save his son - even when he knows that it very well may be a futile gesture - there's a detachment in van Groningen's approach that prevents the film from achieving the kind of emotional punch the Belgian director intended. It's almost too pretty, too self-conscious, and the overriding aesthetic suffocates the actors' performances.