Beautiful Boy: Not Quite It (Movie Review)

A conflicted review of the 2018 movie Beautiful Boy, starring Steve Carell as David Sheff, a father who is losing his beloved son Nic (Timothée Chalamet) to methamphetamine.

"There are moments when I look at him, this kid who I raised, who I thought I knew inside and out, and I wonder who he is.” David Sheff, Beautiful Boy

Here's the thing: I wanted to love this movie.

I needed this movie. I'm in the final sprint of methadone withdrawal now, which entails an emotional rawness akin to a third-degree burn.

I thought that it would be the perfect combo of masochism and catharsis to put myself through watching a story that so echoes my own. I wanted to suffer and be released.

On top of that, I greatly enjoyed and respected Nic Sheff's memoir Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines, which I read over a decade ago, upon which the movie is based. I get through an average of two to three books per week, so for me to still remember individual lines, incidents, characters, and observations after so many years (and so much memory loss) testifies to the powerful impact that the book had on me.

Like The Basketball Diaries, Tweak was one of those addiction memoirs that made me realize that I wasn't quite so alone in my Hell as I had supposed.*

*In addiction to Tweak, the film also draws upon material from a memoir written by Nic Sheff's father, David Sheff, which is called Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction.

On top of all of the above, Timothée Chalamet is one of my favorite contemporary actors - shocking, I know, given how difficult he is on the eyes. He's graced us with a first-rate performance in Call Me by Your Name, a film based on one of the greatest first love stories of all time, as well as a creditable performance as the hero of Dune, Frank Herbert's science fiction epic, which has been one of my favorite books since I was a boy.

I thought he'd probably been well-cast for this role; I expected to love him.

Like many Millennials, I also have fond memories of Steve Carell from his days as bumbling middle manager Michael Scott in The Office as well as the other, more substantive roles that followed. I imagine him as a kind, devoted dad, so once again, I went into the film with optimism.

What I'm getting at here is that I was primed to appreciate Beautiful Boy.

Unfortunately, to be blunt, the film fell short of my expectations as well as the standards set by Nic Sheff's memoir.

If you'll forgive me for being so gauche as to use a rating system, I'd give the movie 3.5 stars out of 5 - worth watching, with some powerful, poignant moments. It delivers some worthwhile insight into the disease at the core of the Sheff family's nightmare, but it misses the mark in several crucial respects, as well.

High Points

Recovery Is Nonlinear

The film begins with Nic as an 18-year-old entering rehab for the first time. For the past two years, he has been abusing a smorgasbord of psychoactive drugs; two months before the film's opening scene, he has begun to use meth, which becomes his drug of choice.

The film follows Nic through inpatient treatment, after which he decides that he will put off entering college in order to spend time in a halfway house. A short while later, he leaves the halfway house and disappears on a binge, following which he reenters treatment.

Nic gets it together again and heads off to college, at which point he meets a girl, relapses on prescription medications and heroin, and then leaves college to reenter treatment. He becomes involved in 12-Step programs and puts together 14 months of clean time, after which he relapses again.

And so it goes. The film shows us the cycles of hope and headway, relapse and shame and recommitment and redemption.

We even hear the dreaded "Relapse is a part of recovery" slogan from a doctor speaking to Nic's dad at one point in the film.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, there is an old statistic that says that - of the roughly 3 to 10 percent of heroin addicts who achieve long-term sobriety without methadone or Suboxone maintenance treatment - it takes, on average, seven treatment episodes before recovery clicks.

Recovery from addiction is nonlinear. It is iterative and messy, and the film does an extraordinarily cruel and capricious disease justice in denying a more straightforward, palatable healing arc.

One Fucked-Up Family

As British journalist Johann Hari notes in his seminal TED Talk on addiction, "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety; the opposite of addiction is connection."*

*It's called "Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong," and my summary of it, which contains a link to a recording, is available here.

Not surprisingly, most addicts come from troubled families.

It's the film's examination of addiction as a family disease that distinguishes Beautiful Boy from other accounts of addiction, which tend to orbit tightly around the addicted person's perspective, and in its depiction of these difficult dynamics, the film earns points.

Nic comes from a privileged and accomplished family. Growing up, he's very close with his father despite the fact that his dad divorces his mom, remarries, and relocates when Nic is only a few years old.

The film is filled with flashbacks of Nic's young life, including early-morning surfing sessions with his father; the two of them speaking mock Klingon in a cafe; Nic's dad expressing how proud he is of Nic's writing and his other achievements. These moments establish the person that Nic used to be, which gives weight to the loss of the beautiful, talented young man that he is at his core.

However, when Nic enters his teenage years, tensions and fault lines emerge. In one scene, when David suggests that the angsty, teenage Nic not dwell too much on the works of nihilistic and misanthropic writers, Nic brushes off his father's advice, which strikes him as blithe, in irritation.

There is a darkness and a loneliness in Nic that David does not fully appreciate or understand how to deal with, and this difference in temperament and perspective causes friction between the two.

Their relationship is further complicated by David's own, openly acknowledged history of experimentation with drugs. At one point, at Nic's suggestion, the two of them even share a joint to celebrate Nic's college acceptances.

As someone who comes from a family riddled with addicts, this dynamic is hugely relatable. The shared partying, then the twisted resentment that comes later down the line - "You did the same thing that I'm doing, and encouraged me to do it, and now it's killing me even though you could always control it!" - and the reciprocal "I could control it; why can't you?" poisons relationships and creates incredible guilt in family members whose substance use doesn't destroy them.

Though the film is centered upon David Sheff's relationship with his son, the other family dynamics involved are equally interesting.

David and his first wife, Vicki Sheff (Nic's mom; played by Amy Ryan), spend the first two-thirds of the film throwing blame back and forth like a hot potato. David is angry that Vicki hasn't been more involved in Nic's life; Vicki resents that Nic often chooses to stay with his father rather than come to LA to spend time with her.

As Nic bounces between the two of them during relapse and recovery, the parents blame each other for their inconceivable loss.

True to life, the film depicts Nic taking advantage of this strain: "Mom should've gotten custody!" He screams at his father during one drugged-out conflict, undoubtedly understanding that this is the worst thing he could say to his dad.

In the end, as Vicki and Dave engage in Al-Anon* and come to accept that Nic is very likely to die and that there is nothing more that the two of them can do to save him, Dave and Vicki forgive and unite.

*12-Step program for loved ones of addicts and alcoholics, which helps people to set healthy boundaries and come to terms with the fact that they cannot save an addict. Highly, highly recommend for family and friends of addicts.

Perhaps the most interesting of the nuclear family dynamics is Nic's relationship with his stepmom, Karen Barbour (Maura Tierney).

One of the flashbacks shows a young Nic standing beside his dad and Karen during their wedding. It is clear from the start of Nic's addictive troubles that Karen loves him as her own and that she is willing to do anything to save him.

One of the most affecting scenes in the film arrives when Nic relapses for the umpteenth time. He's supposed to be attending his stepbrother's swim meet but instead brings his girlfriend along to break into the family home while everyone else is out.

The rest of the family returns to the house, and Nic and his girlfriend barely make it out before David and Karen realize what's going on. At this point, Karen becomes a woman possessed.

She screams at her biological children to stay in the house, then hops into her car and speeds after Nic and his girlfriend in their getaway car. Hate and rage and terrifying fed-upness play across her face to the tune of the suitably shrill and shifting song "Of Once and Future Kings," by Pavlov's Dog.

Karen eventually stops the car and pulls over, but not before the scene drives home the extent to which addiction has changed everyone in the Sheff family, forced Vicki to choose between Nic and her two remaining kids, and brought everyone involved to the brink.

Nic's relationships with his younger stepsiblings also hit a profoundly true-to-life note.

It's the way that Nic plays with them in the film's domestic scenes that makes the viewer fall in love him in the first place. There is a subtle, sordid sadness to the scenes when Nic steals Jasper's $8 savings, and, later, when Karen isn't sure if she should let newly sober Nic supervise Jasper surfing.

This understated loss of faith and reliability perhaps better captures the truth of addiction than any of the more loudly rendered moments in the film.

"Did Nic not come to my swim meet because he's on drugs again?" Nic's elementary-school-aged stepbrother asks flatly during the scene when Nic and his girlfriend rob the family home.

It hits true, fam. It hits.

The Reality of Addiction Treatment in America

"I don't know who you've been talking to or who promised you what, but the success rates are in the single digits," a neuroscientist tells David of meth addiction at one point in the film. The man then discusses Nic's VMAT levels*, showing exactly how far this father has gone to find answers about the disease that is killing his son.

*A diagnostic marker related to dopamine metabolism that is used to evaluate brain damage in meth addicts in research studies.

The family's journey to understand treatment - its ups and downs, what is known about addiction and what isn't - is heartbreakingly familiar.

When they first send Nic off to inpatient rehab, they're naively optimistic that a few weeks away will fix him, and that Nic will then be off to college in the fall as planned. They believe what the staff psychiatrist is telling them about the strengths of the program that Nic is enrolling in.

Later on, as "Relapse is a part of recovery" becomes a family refrain, they come to realize that many of the "experts" that they have been listening to have very little to offer.

The reality of meth and opioid addiction, as I often emphasize, is that they have a prognosis comparable to the most deadly of cancers, except that they do not attract nearly the public interest, sense of urgency, fundraising, and research efforts of comparable diseases. (Moreover, because of malpractice litigation concerns and antiquated standards of care, doctors are severely limited in what experimental treatments they can use to help dying addicts in the U.S.).

Although Nic's family is upper middle class, they also come up against the expense of quality treatment, which costs tens of thousands of dollars per month in the U.S.

Although Nic eventually makes it out of addiction, the film doesn't forget the 90%+ of addicts who do not. It closes with a stunning statistic: That overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under age 50.

Again, in portraying the full, grisly picture, the film does an insidious disease justice. Although we learn at the conclusion of the film that handsome and privileged Nic has been clean and sober for nine years, it's easy to understand how families without his parents' strengths and resources would utterly fall through the cracks.*

*I have a bone to pick with one of the Fin screens of the film, which refers to addiction treatment as "under-researched and under-regulated." Under-researched, certainly. And I understand what the filmmakers meant, in a sense, with "under-regulated" - that addiction treatment is not standardized, and supervision is often spotty. Moreover, non-evidence-based practices such as 12-Step programs are often used as the cornerstone of treatment programs, particularly at treatment centers covered by insurance or for indigent patients.

However, addiction medicine is actually the most over-regulated field of medicine in the U.S. Compared to anesthesiology and pain management, which are the specialties that actually generate new addicts and lead to diverted drugs, the restrictions on addiction med and psych docs prescribing controlled substances to addicts are almost unfathomably severe. Even for drugs such as buprenorphine and methadone, which are approved for use in opioid detox and maintenance, there are patient caps and monitoring requirements that do not apply to any other areas of medicine or to the same substances prescribed for other purposes.

Entire bureaucratic monstrosities such as methadone clinics have been created to monitor and restrict addicts and those who treat them. In the U.S., addiction medicine is in fact heinously overregulated, which is a real barrier to competent docs entering the field and pioneering new treatments.

False Notes

Overplaying the Hand

I understand that Nic is being presented as the angry, artistic, addicted young man™.

However, during the film's frequent, intense scenes of familial conflict, both Carell's and Chalamet's performances come up short on believability.

Perhaps it's that the telltale physiologic signs of true anger - the shaking and flecks of spit, the dilated pupils - are missing.

I know that some actors don't believe in method acting, but these performances leave me doubting whether either man has actually dealt with an active addict. The rage of addiction - a terrible anger at oneself for not being able to stop (and at God for either not existing or for giving one the disease in the first place) - is something that no one who has witnessed it will ever forget.

This anger rises to a kind of insanity; it comes to the surface with terrifying suddenness and unpredictably, and - like the screams of the teachers and students at Columbine and the conversation between the "Let's roll" flight members on 9/11 - maybe it's too much to expect even very talented actors to replicate them.

Whether this is the case or not, I didn't feel more than a distant echo of the emotional reality of addiction during most of the film. In fact, I found many of the high-intensity arguments that occupy much of the two-hour movie stilted and tiresome.

The more that I reflect on it, the more I suspect that it's probably an issue of contrast and pacing. As I mentioned above, the film does include flashbacks to Nic's earlier life, as well as some wholesome domestic moments scattered throughout Nic's periods of recovery.

However, there isn't even a single real laugh in the entire film. Anyone who has ever been around addicts and addiction treatment knows that hilarity - belly-laughing, cannot-inhale humor - follows addicts like criminal charges.

As Joan Rivers put it, "Where there's pain, there's laughter," and families struggling with addiction have perhaps more pain than people in almost any other circumstances.

The film sticks to an artificially restricted emotional register: It similarly elides the hopeless, hollow apathy that often overcomes all parties involved in addiction as they burn out after years of high-octane emotional exchanges.

Likewise, the film doesn't include a solitary scene in which Nic acts believably high. There are no episodes of energetic, perhaps even manic, enthusiasm; no times when the family has to navigate the strangeness of being around someone who is jet-pack high when they themselves are sober.

Having the film strike such a high, difficult emotional note early on during the family arguments over Nic's addiction, then attempt to sustain that intensity for two hours, is exhausting and ineffective.

I felt worn-out by the end. I'm not sure if it’s a me thing; if it’s a Beautiful Boy-specific thing; or if it’s just impossible to capture the reality of the family dynamics of addiction in two hours of cinema.*

*The cinematographic monotony reinforced the problems with pacing. The film has an impressive soundtrack, but it was underutilized. It also passed up opportunities to use passages from Nic's and David's memoirs to liven up the presentation and remind viewers that this all really occurred.

Perhaps it would've been more effective to shift the fulcrum around which the story is told to include at least a couple of scenes of Nic reestablishing his life after achieving sustained recovery. The rebuilding of trust with his parents after years of erratic, caustic behavior, the rekindling of closeness with his younger stepsiblings, the process of discovering what has been irretrievably lost in these relationships and what remains - no doubt they yielded moving, thoughtful moments that would serve as a useful counterpoint to the screaming matches referenced above.

The question of when, if ever, his family came to accept that Nic was really, finally, "back," is an intriguing one that is left completely unaddressed.

***

Surprisingly, the one scene in the film that brought tears to my eyes didn't involve a performance by a leading cast member.

The scene in question takes place at an Al-Anon meeting, where David and Karen have gone to learn about setting boundaries while Nic simultaneously suffers a nearly fatal OD in a public restroom somewhere.

In this scene, a woman who has just lost her daughter shares that with the Al-Anon group. In a matter-of-fact, almost robotic tone, she speaks of her daughter: "I lost my dear daughter this week... I'm in mourning, I guess. Actually, I realized that I've been in mourning for a really long time. Even when she was alive, she wasn't there. In a way, it's better, I guess. I hope she's not in pain now."

The flat, empty delivery as this woman shares the ultimate nightmare of every loved one in the Al-Anon room, which all too many of them will confront in reality in the months and years to come, was the emotional climax of the film for me.

I've heard similar things said about other addicts, and I can easily imagine the same being said of me.

Forgot the Important Bits

I understand that the film is a freestanding work of art, and that it is an adaptation of two books. However, the fact is that the filmmakers left out some of the most important, explanatory bits of Nic's memoir.

In the movie, we see Nic repeatedly relapse without getting any sense of what's changing within him during that process. Finally, after a near-death OD in the film's penultimate scene, we are to assume that Nic receives his Come-to-Jesus (aka Get-Sober-or-Die) moment.

However, the aforementioned scene comes across as contrived and convenient, begging the question: Why didn't Nic wake up during all of the near-death calls that came before?

This is a notable hole that the truth of Nic's life could fill in.

In the movie, Nic's only significant romantic relationship is with a girl who he corrupts by showing her how to shoot up. This young woman plays no role in the evolution of his addiction; she's essentially a cardboard cutout character.

In his memoir, by contrast, Nic spends a good chunk of the book describing his long-term relationship with another addict named Zelda. This older woman is the daughter of a well-known Hollywood type; there is cachet for aspiring writer Nic in dating her.

She and Nic date and live together for years, falling into and out of recovery together. They have fantastic, grody meth sex, and they are wholly, twistedly in love; at some points in his narrative, you get the sense that they would rather die together than recover separately.

In Nic's story as he tells it, his relationship with Zelda overshadows all of his relationships with family members combined.

In Nic's own account of his addiction, it is his coming to understand his codependency with Zelda and the unhealthy way that he has approached sex and romantic relationships in general that saves him. By untangling this fraught relationship, he's able to shift how he relates to other people in a way that will support a healthy, sober life.

These nuanced, mature realizations about how Nic's relationships need to change in order to be compatible with recovery function as one of the two emotional inflection points of the book; I remember this aspect of his story over a decade later.

The second inflection point arrives when a fellow addict who Nic has become very close to dies of overdose while Nic is still in treatment.

We love others even when we cannot love ourselves, and we can see in them aspects of our own addictions that we have blinded ourselves to out of self-preservative necessity or lack of self-compassion and self-understanding. Sometimes, it is losing fellow addicts who we love that finally wakes us up.

It made sense to me, in the book, that Nic loving and losing another addict caused the reality of what he was putting himself through to register for him in a new way.

In the film, what is certainly Nic's umpteenth OD suddenly waking him up doesn't really compute.

Leaving these two paradigm-changing events out of the film creates a hollow, unbelievable story; it's as though the characters and events of the film orbit a black hole.

In laying down this criticism, I'm very cognizant of the limitations of the medium. As I've suggested above, perhaps film simply isn't the best vehicle for conveying the emotional intricacies of addiction (although it can be a wonderful medium for depicting its idiosyncratic humor à la Trainspotting or its hallucinogenic adventurism à la Requiem for a Dream).

The fact is that we are to understand that Nic is a complicated, cerebral young man. Whereas in Nic's book, we are given detailed insight into the complicated battle with himself that evolves during his many stints in treatment and recovery, in the movie, all of that is left to imputation and implication, and it is so very much the worse and less believable for that.*

*Final criticism: Nic being diagnosed with and treated for bipolar disorder was a crucial factor in his recovery IRL. This is another aspect of his story that is totally ignored in the film, which is a shame because the issues of treatment inadequacy that it touches upon very much have to do with undiagnosed and untreated co-occurring disorders, which are perhaps the number one reason why addicts struggle with recovery.

Nic's Dad Trying Meth

Disclaimer: I have no fucking idea if David Sheff really tried meth to "help him understand what Nic was going through." I haven't read his book, and after seeing this lackluster film, which I suspect was corrupted by overreliance on David Sheff's perspective, I don't intend to, frankly.

But if Nic's dad did try meth, all I can say is that am shocked by his irresponsibility and self-indulgence. You see a substance demonically possess your beloved son - at the same time threatening to destroy your first and second wives and your two young children - all the while consulting experts who tell you that there is a less than 10 percent chance of recovery from addiction to it, and that the brain damage that it causes is irreversible - and you're going to take the risk of ingesting that substance yourself?

What in the ever-loving fuck?

I know that I shouldn't be so judgy. His dad was at an emotional breaking point, after all. And to be fair, I've been in treatment with children of addicts who have shared that their drug use was a way to understand, spend time with, and become closer to their parents. The difference is that they engaged in this behavior while young, foolish, and searching.

Again, maybe I'm just being a dick, but I didn't buy this scene, and I hope very much that it didn't occur in reality.

The Verdict

Ugh, I'm not happy with myself as I try to wrap this up. Beautiful Boy is an oversimplified and underconvincing film about a very complex reality, further complicated by the fact that I believe that it doesn't do justice to a laudable addiction memoir.

I have mixed feelings about it, to say the least.

Perhaps the kindest take is that this reaction, if not intended, isn't all the film's fault. Addiction itself is arbitrary, senseless, repetitive, and hyperbolic; maybe having that "this is stupid!" response to seeing it play out on screen means that the film has, in fact, captured some of the essence of the disease.

If someone who is an addict, who loves an addict, or who wants to learn more about addiction for other reasons asked if me if they should watch Beautiful Boy, I'd say sure - go for it. It gives a certain amount of insight into some aspects of one family's addictive story.

I'd recommend almost any well-written addiction memoir, including Tweak, as a much better way to better understand the disease, though.

There are truth and beauty in Beautiful Boy, but balance, depth, and staying power are lacking.

What the hell, Timothée.