Beautiful Boy - What's It All About, Nic?

Beautiful Boy comes out on British screens tomorrow - and if the film has socking great flaws in its concept and execution, well, that's OK, because it's 'about' something. Dismiss it at your peril, for here is a film whose subject is so obviously necessary and important, and so self-seriously handled here by a team wishing to 'do justice to the subject matter', that it hardly matters if the film has any qualities of its own. We demand aboutness now - or at least, from those few movies that don't centre on magic immortals beating ten shades of Stars and Stripes out of each other. And how blessed we are, to have--alongside the obligatory biopics 'about' recognisable stars whose fame simply demands a film treatment--an endless supply of 'issue' movies. HIV, slavery, drugs, gay conversion therapy or the financial crash of 2007-2008: these are all not just valid topics for a film, but subjects whence it's easy to dispense an ever desirable lesson of some shape. "I don't think it really had all that much to say," people will observe of a standard film telling a simple story, before weeping hot tears at Beautiful Boy's basic "drugs are bad" homilies. Amy Poehler put it best when hosting the Golden Globes a few years back: "I loved 12 Years A Slave, and I can honestly say that after seeing that film I will never look at slavery the same way again."

But looking beyond the towering whatness of Beautiful Boy to its simpering howness, you quickly find an obvious paucity of means for treating this matter. And, in being so clearly thin, Beautiful Boy manages to let in some big errors, not least an unthinkingly patriarchal stance that obviously sinks the movie. In a better film with more resources, fewer embarrassing gimmicks and a more coherent concept, it might not matter so much that everything is so unquestioningly masculine. But Beautiful Boy is riddled with peacocking masculinity, offering a declension of malehood in two characters who, of course, clash in the way they own the scenes and the characters around them. To Steve Carell's cool-dad sincerity, rag-losing and cloying heartbreak, the film opposes the nu-kid Chalamet in expressionistic drugs hell and junkie dickhead mode. Rather than question their relationship in any way--perhaps examining the inevitable toxicity of their proprietorial rapport and their individual solipsism--the movie is content to observe them strut their man-ness about the place, according each one moments of deplorable grandstanding or self-consciously candid 'reflection'. This is some butch stuff, playing at emotional vulnerability in order to assert all the better the power of new men. In the process, women are cast off to the sides: witness a hilariously nothing scene where Maura Tierney's nobody character gives chase to Nic (Chalamet) and his no-one girlfriend in her car, only to lose track of them and for her lone big moment to fizzle out like an old balloon in the corner of a party. This is about as much as she is granted--the same goes for Amy Ryan as Nic's mother--because the film is only interested in its duelling musketeers. For swords, merely substitute 'emoting'.

These faults are so glaring because of the film's quite mind-bogglingly ropy form, from its shambolically indelicate music cues through to its SNL-level montages; from the uncontrolled performances to its on-the-nose set decoration; from the cutesy-poo writing to the wobbly flashback structure; from the uneven tone to its dreary aesthetic. So many scenes are boring, unconvincing, or plain incomprehensible - a Nirvana-set flashback perhaps encapsulates these defects best, with its overwrought visuals, the way it is chucked so roughshod into the main narrative, and its comically heightened performances. Of course it would be raining at Nic's lowest ebb! So many other scenes overplay their hand, or on the contrary go nowhere, such as David Sheff's lolworthy experiment with drugs to get into his idiotic son's headspace. At no point does the film puncture any of this rot with something approaching wit or bite. All it presents is stuff, an accumulation of flat scenes that get us from the drug addiction narrative's beginning to the drug addiction narrative's end. At least, I suppose, the film doesn't attempt to make out there is much to be learned from the mess we've witnessed - but it does end on some typically solemn post-credits "Nic is now twelve years clean" guff, as if we have watched a searching documentary rather than a tepid staging of moments.

We need more from films than having them merely tell us things, because we should be educating ourselves on films' means. The undeserved showing of awards, for a while now, onto issues films, and onto performances that can be easily matched to the 'real-life' originals, shows that we are lacking in creativity, and in the ways we interpret original material. Film must be more than merely a rendering: we have to make a case for inventive, loopy, bold, virtuoso film-making whose very mode is its outstanding quality rather than its matter.