Timothée Chalamet is the star of the moment, with two big projects now in theaters:Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. After his breakthrough as Call Me By Your Name’s Elio, the young actor’s rise was meteoric, resulting in a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination and countless opportunities. Since 2017, though, Chalamet hasn’t been able to recapture the Academy’s attention despite having some buzzy projects. Until now, the closest he ever came to a second nomination was in Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy. The film was based on the real-life story of drug addiction and familial bonds detailed in David and Nic Sheff’s memoirs. Hollywood’s current favorite twink is heartbreaking in the titular role…
Like a hyper-sincere afterschool special, Beautiful Boy tries to alert its audience while pushing human drama to paroxysms of melodrama or cloying sentimentality. It’s a very polished film, eminently respectable but voracious for prestige. Dramatizing a personal history of unimaginable suffering through shattered chronology gives the actors a lot to do. Still, despite treating its subject with adequate solemnity, the movie is afraid of going deep into the tale’s complexities, reducing the character to their trauma, in a procession of misery and cyclical relapses. It makes sense as a dramaturgical approach but it also handicaps the movie, limiting what it can say about the characters and their perspectives. Indeed, Beautiful Boy feels undecided about what it wants to be, about what film it should strive to become.
The big question is if it wants to examine Nic as an unknowable entity only perceived through the eyes of a father (Steve Carell) who feels alienated from his son or if, instead, it should grant humanity and narrative agency to the young man too. In some ways, it feels as if Felix van Groeningen is pursuing storytelling guided by emotion rather than action, a commendable choice that still results in unintended abstraction. The non-linear structure further supports this idea, evoking the mercurial quality of the troubled relationships at the story’s heart while sabotaging the portrayal of evolving characterizations. Past and present, memory and direct experience bleed into each other from two individual purviews, resulting in a mush of commendable ambitions and little to no payoff.
Such deliberate shapelessness makes it hard to evaluate Timothée Chalamet’s take on Nic beyond individual moments. He repeatedly makes fast and powerful impressions that can either be dismissed as superficial or embraced as viscerally raw. Early on, there’s a game of contrasts giving a semblance of order to the portrayal. The young addict oscillates between desperate withdrawal exemplified by painful moans and twitchy body language, a sense of numb apathy and, most unnerving of all, a kind of childish optimism that tastes like manipulation even as we want to believe it is genuine. None of the acting mechanisms at hand feel particularly original, especially the mopey averted gazes and half-lidded looks that Chalamet employs when Nic’s down. In many ways, it always comes off as an interpretation of addiction rather than an embodiment.
Nevertheless, it’d be a false to say he's ineffective. Even as Beautiful Boy wastes all its dramatic potential on indulgent misery and some perplexing editing choices, there’s an intensity to Chalamet’s Nic that cuts through the nonsense. He vibrates frightening energy, like a dark sun radiating negative light into the universe, shining through every crack in this imperfect movie. It’s the nervous jokiness with which an adolescent Nic invites his dad to share a joint cut against the petulant confessions during a rehab confrontation. His happiness is beautifully expressive, but it’s always a prelude to disappointment, a self-knowing façade that’s on the verge of collapse. Chalamet looks so young in the part, bringing the bruised fragility of innocence to this dynamic, eliciting pity with little more than a trembling lip and unshed tears. We know how easily and regularly he breaks.
As an example, notice how his interactions with younger siblings during times of doped up joy are infectious little morsels of tone variation in a performance that leans perhaps a bit too much in dourness. However, one never takes these instances for granted or lets themselves fall into the scene’s mood. It’s always certain that, moments later, we’ll see the young man fall back into old habits, stealing from the kids and denying everything to his father with rage and shame blazing in the eyes. Instead of convincing us of Nic’s crafty evasions, Chalamet makes him a terrible liar even when he’s lying to himself; it's aa fascinating choice even though it doesn’t alter the monotony of observing him go through the same gradations and mini-arc time and time again.
One can detect a deliberate opacity in the performance, perchance a construction of mystery as a signal of incomprehensible needs happening beneath the surface of any given scene. Still, the mix of emotional vulnerability and blocked-off interiority only results in frustration. He translates intensity through overt demonstrativeness that sometimes breaks apart before our eyes, receding into an incapacity to articulate thoughts and words, a diffusion of attention that recalls a toddler going through a sugar high. The whispery delivery’s great for such a register, but it also grows tiring If not for the actor’s boyish charm, both movie and performance would have been much harder to watch, that’s for sure.
Even so, as the movie goes on, both Chalamet and Beautiful Boy itself only spring back to life in instances of open hostility when that hushed voice and over-emphasized inarticulation can take a step back for some juicy Oscar-bait snarls. Yet, reading back on these words, they feel too negative about a performance that is, essentially, the best part of the movie. Chalamet’s an open wound and there’s craft to the pain he dramatizes, even as we’re always outside looking in. Consider the difference in how a son hugs his father, the way aggressive lines die out in a soft whimper or how the actor telegraphs the effect of drugs. Nic is anesthetized to life itself and only comes back to life, comes back into himself, when a needle injects artificial vitality back into his system.
We never quite get what drove Nic to experiment with addictive substances and chase self-destruction, but Chalamet makes sure we know why he keeps doing it. Finally, there’s great technical finesse to how he plays phone calls. In a story so focused on the broken communication between family members, there are plenty of scenes when we watch the characters agonizing over their phones, lying through their teeth, whether hiding their true intentions or trying to disguise how tender they really feel. A moment ruminating on disease and culpability is lacerating beyond belief, a shot of unvarnished ugliness in a movie that seldom allows itself to gaze directly at hideous truth. Beautiful Boy persistently keeps Nic out of reach but the actor playing him does try to bridge the gap between the character and the spectator. He doesn’t always succeed but the effort deserves applause.
Like many before and after him, Chalamet campaigned for Best Supporting Actor prizes despite having a leading role. The strategy worked out for him, considering the mountain of awards nominations he accumulated throughout the 2018/9 season. Indeed, Chalamet earned all the principal precursor nominations, for BAFTA, Golden Globes, SAG, and Critics Choice Awards. Despite all of this, he failed to secure an Oscar nomination. AMPAS’ chosen five were Mahershala Ali in Green Book, Adam Driver in BlacKkKlansman, Sam Elliott in A Star Is Born, Richard E. Grant in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and Sam Rockwell in Vice. Ali won his second statuette while Rockwell was the likely fifth-placer for his impression of George W. Bush. Should Chalamet have been nominated instead of the Vice actor?
Beautiful Boy is streaming on Amazon Prime Video. You can also rent it on some other platforms, like iTunes and Youtube.