Beautiful Boy is drawn from a pair of memoirs on methamphetamine addiction, one by David Sheff and the other by his addict son Nic. However, the film is more dad’s story as it follows his often hopeless-seeming quest to bring Nic out of the blackhole in which he fell.
The acting is quietly powerful and convincing. David is played by Steve Carell with all the wearied weight of a father who fears he has lost his son. Within minutes, it’s easy to forget that Carell’s métier has mostly been comedy, not despair. Timothée Chalamet (Call Me By My Name), co-starring as Nic, veers believably across the spectrum between defiance and misery. And yes, he is also able to play the beautiful boy his father remembers. Director Felix van Groeningen neatly flips between the story’s painful main line and dad’s memories.
David always wanted to befriend as well as mentor Nic. There was no generation gap as they gun down the highway with punk-metal blasting on the stereo or share a joint in an especially candid moment when Nic speaks of his love for alcohol, pot and other drugs. They take “the edge off stupid everyday reality,” he explains to his not-entirely unsympathetic dad. The conservative critique suggests itself: gateway drugs! But the confounding reality is that marijuana doesn’t lead to methamphetamine any more than caffeine leads to marijuana.
Crystal meth is the hardest of all hard drugs for the damage inflicted on the nervous system of Nic and other addicts. The first dose turns black-and-white to Technicolor but the user must raise the second dose to reach that same rainbow and before long the colors fade to a sickening shade of gray.
At least in the film version of Beautiful Boy, none of the usual reason are offered for Nic’s embrace of meth. His background is affluent, his college applications have been accepted, he’s smart and creative, had a girlfriend, and although his parents are divorced, he gets on well with dad’s new wife and his new siblings. And yet, “stupid everyday reality” is unsatisfying in a world where consumption in one form or another is the guiding principle. Nic just wants to alter the texture of reality.
Beautiful Boy touches on the false hope offered by some rehab centers whose programs, in any event, are too expensive for the majority, and wrestles with whether the bond of some addictions is too strong to break. In a despairing moment, David asks whether anyone, even a loving father, can save someone who refuses salvation?
