Beautiful Boy an emotional ‘ordeal’ but worth the watch

DON’T sugar coat it — Beautiful Boy is an ordeal, but it’s one that you should steel yourself for, with the stellar acting making the confronting story relatable to all viewers.

THE magnificent Beautiful Boy is not just an emotionally raw and rigorously authentic take on one young man’s long descent into drug addiction.

The film also leaves a lasting, illuminating impression for the way in which it carefully catalogues a father’s many despairing attempts to reach down and pull his beloved son out of the mire.

Let’s not sugar coat anything here. Beautiful Boy is clearly one of those ‘ordeal’ movies you may not be inclined to put yourself through.

In this one instance, however, you really should take a deep breath, steel yourself, and take the plunge.

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Maura Tierney, left, and with Steve Carell. He plays a desperate father in the film. Picture: Francois Duhamel/Amazon Studios via AP

For this masterfully composed production has a rare grasp of the explosive impact an inexplicably desperate need for drugs can have on a typical user.

Just as importantly, Beautiful Boy does not forget about the devastating impact on family and friends watching helplessly from the edge of the blast zone.

This is the true story of Nic Sheff (Timothée Chalamet), a promising young student whose tentative dabbles with light drugs eventually morph into a lengthy and heavy addiction to ice.

As he floats in the deep, dark spaces between recovery and relapse, the lifelines cast out by his desperate father David (Steve Carell) become harder to hold on to for very long.

The creative genesis of Beautiful Boy is unusual in that it is based on not one, but two books written about the crisis that engulfed the Sheffs just over a decade ago.

The better-known of the two volumes was written by David (an experienced journalist who first chronicled these events in a piece for the New York Times), with the other penned by Nic himself.

Timothee Chalamet as Nic Sheff and Steve Carell as David Scheff.

These dual perspectives lend Beautiful Boy a copious amount of penetrating insights into the addiction experience — particularly when it comes to the ever-expanding plague of ice that is swamping the western world — that it is honour-bound not to waste.

What must be noted is that the movie never makes the mistake of talking down to its audience, or sideswiping them with manipulative dramatic tropes.

Neither is Beautiful Boy a stern moralistic lecture, a pleading public service announcement, or a clinical case study. It is simply an all too recognisable reflection of how one life can go horribly wrong, despite so many tries to get it right.

Just as the direction, cinematography, music score and scripting are all keenly attuned to the movie’s open-hearted intentions to tell and feel it like it is, the performances sync up soulfully with the subject at hand.

While Carell serves as an excellent anchor for Beautiful Boy in terms of keeping its confronting storytelling relatable to all viewers, the exemplary work of Chalamet in a demanding and draining role heralds the complete arrival of an imposing young talent.

After this flawless performance (and another Oscar-nominated one in last summer’s Call Me By Your Name), we are definitely looking at an actor who could be anything he wants in the years ahead.

As for Beautiful Boy, it stands as a total must-see for anyone trying to make sense of what an addiction is doing to their loved ones, or looking to make peace with what an addiction has already done.

BEAUTIFUL BOY (MA15+)

Director: Felix Van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown)

Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Steve Carell, Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan, Timothy Hutton.

Rating: Four stars

Where there is ice, there is hell freezing over