Star turns by Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell tainted by subpar music in Beautiful Boy

By Patrick Sullivan, Film & TV Editor

Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet are a powerfully emotive father-son duo in this adaptation of David and Nic Sheff's real life memoirs about how the latter struggled growing up with a drug addiction.

Both of their performances are geared towards receiving awards, but Chalamet is the standout as teenage drug addict Nic Sheff. He embodies the addict as a charming, manipulative prodigy with a self-destructive streak. ‘I’m attracted to craziness,’ he says to his dad at a dinner after disappearing for another two days.

His sweet smile separates from Nic's varying personality. When high or recovering, he twitches, chews his jaw, and hazes his eyes. The director, Felix van Groeningen, and his director of photography, Ruben Impens, use neat techniques to translate the effects of crystal meth and heroin in particular. While driving high, the haze of his iris is projected, light brown, onto the windscreen and flickers and fades as the car swerves.

Steve Carell is a more stable presence as David, the concerned father. He has expanded on his early career successfully by injecting his natural comedic tendencies into more dramatic films. In one memorable scene,, the rehab centre tells him that ‘relapse is part of recovery,’ and he retorts to great effect: ‘That’s like saying crashing is part of pilot training.’ Carell and Chalamet form a believable paternal relationship, but Carell remains when Chalamet is replaced by younger actors in flashbacks.

The timeline of the film is muddled. It opens with David explaining to a doctor his concerns: ‘There are moments I look at him, this boy I know inside and out, and I wonder - who is he?’ The doctor goes on to describe the effects of crystal meth on the brain. Then it cuts to one year earlier, darting back to Nic as a child, then forward to college, then back to another version of young Nic, then forward, but only to teenage Nic. Overall, the jumps are confusing.

Sometimes the memories support the present successfully as Van Groeningen melds them together with voiceovers linking the scene transitions. However, if specific year dates were listed instead - the real life events happened between around 1999 and 2005 - it would assist the chronology of the story.

Another jarring aspect of the film is the music. The subject is so honest and emotive: heroin is seen heated on spoons close up and injected into dilapidated arms; Nic resuscitates his friend after an overdose; David is so unrelenting in his pursuit to save his son. There is no reason to be so heavy handed with the music. There is a mixture of fast jazz, lyrical opera, and even hard rock, which contradicts the emotion of the big scenes, which would have been sensational with a more stripped-back soundtrack.

There is a smattering of supporting characters left unexplored in the film. Even his mother, played by Amy Ryan, only disturbs the father-son dynamic in fleeting moments. Half an hour in, there is a mini romance after Nic reads out a Charles Bukowski poem in college, and it seems as if it would be key, but alas, this plot point lasts barely five minutes. Two younger siblings merely exist, barely contributing to the film.

Most prominent is Karen (Maura Tierney), David’s new wife and co-parent - she is at least given two significant scenes in the latter third. It is a pleasant surprise at this point to see her more involved, yet the scenes feel inauthentic due to her meagre emotional development in the first hour and a half.

The film is clearly reliant on the star performances of Carell and Chalamet - indeed, it does all it can to centre the piece on them. The focus of the camera is obsessed, ignoring almost all others in the foreground or background of each frame. Despite the failings of the music and lack of character development elsewhere, it’s largely rewarding - the pair convey their real life counterparts expertly, and Beautiful Boy is a heartfelt education in drugs and the families of addicts because of them.

Beautiful Boy is on general release from January 18 and also available on Amazon Prime.

Featured Image Credit: London Film Festival / Beautiful Boy

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