Beau­ti­ful Boy

At the ten­der age of 22, Timothée Cha­la­met has the world at his feet. His con­fi­dent turn in Call Me by Your Name launched a thou­sand Twit­ter fan accounts and earned him an Acad­e­my Award nom­i­na­tion. Such suc­cess so young could be a poi­soned chal­ice – how do you fol­low up a per­for­mance as remark­able as that? The short answer, judg­ing by Chalamet’s lat­est: you head in the oppo­site direction.

Felix Van Groeningen’s Beau­ti­ful Boy, based on the twin mem­oirs of David Sheff and his son Nic, is a mil­lion miles from ten­der teen romance on the sun- dap­pled piaz­zas of Cre­ma. Nic (Cha­la­met) is a meth addict, and he spi­rals away from his sup­port­ive fam­i­ly and fur­ther towards his reliance on drugs and alco­hol. His jour­nal­ist father David (Steve Carell) makes sin­cere attempts to under­stand his son’s dis­ease, but risks push­ing him fur­ther away in the process as he tries to remain sup­port­ive while also nudg­ing Nic towards rehabilitation.

David’s desire to under­stand his son’s addic­tion through fac­tu­al, jour­nal­is­tic research sees him turn to the famil­iar in search of the unknown. At the same time, the shame of being depen­dent on drugs haunts Nic in tan­dem with his desire for anoth­er fix. Cha­la­met flits between aching vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and frus­trat­ed mania, a whirl­wind of ener­gy and emo­tion that proves his star turn in 2017 was no fluke.

An ear­ly con­fronta­tion between Carell and Cha­la­met in a din­er demon­strates the latter’s abil­i­ty to cap­ture fragili­ty with­out stray­ing into manip­u­la­tive sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, but he’s not afraid to show Nic’s destruc­tive nature either, as he steals from his fam­i­ly in order to fund his addic­tion. It’s as easy to root for Nic as it is to become frus­trat­ed with his relapse-recov­ery cycle.

Mean­while, Car­rel proves the per­fect foil, sto­ic as he fights his own feel­ings of fail­ure in being unable to help his son see that life is worth more than what’s offered by the tip of a nee­dle. Van Groenin­gen offers a del­i­cate­ly non-judge­men­tal insight into the spe­cif­ic hell that is meth addic­tion, but is also con­cerned with pro­vid­ing an authen­tic fam­i­ly por­trait, exam­in­ing the intri­ca­cies of father-son rela­tion­ships and how famil­ial expec­ta­tions can shape a child’s development.

He appears less inter­est­ed in the caus­es of addic­tion than its dev­as­tat­ing effects, par­tic­u­lar­ly on Nic’s imme­di­ate fam­i­ly, includ­ing his half-sib­lings, who idolise their trou­bled old­er broth­er. As Nic chas­es his next high, his fam­i­ly chase the ver­sion of him they knew before the drugs, and strug­gle with the real­i­sa­tion that sim­ply lov­ing a per­son may not be enough to save their life.

Although the nar­ra­tive struc­ture itself is a lit­tle shaky and repet­i­tive, when viewed as a char­ac­ter study Beau­ti­ful Boy becomes a tri­umph of per­for­mance and emo­tion­al nuance. Grainy flash­backs show the Sheff fam­i­ly in hap­pi­er times, when seem­ing­ly infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties stretched out ahead of them. It’s the human cost of addic­tion which real­ly hits home, and in offer­ing no easy answers or trite sen­ti­ments, Beau­ti­ful Boy does jus­tice to both the peo­ple fight­ing this afflic­tion, and those doing every­thing in their pow­er to help.