Movie Review: Beautiful Boy

Review Written By Michael J. Ruhland

Michael's Movie Grade: B

Review: A very well made film with real heartfelt emotion, however it does get tiring at times.
What makes this movie work so well is that the characters are so real (yes they are based off of real life people, but how often have characters based off of real people not felt real). This is due to both the script by Luke Davies and Felix van Groeningen (who also directed the movie) and powerful performances from the cast. Steve Carrell and Timothee Chalamet are rightfully being praised for their performances here. These are heart wrenchingly beautiful performances with a single false note in them. However there is not a weak link in the entire cast. The performances will be overlooked here are those of Christian Convery and Oakley Bull who play Nic's Younger siblings. They both give very real performances and manage to tug at your heartstrings. The story itself is a powerful one I fortunately have never had a loved one struggle with addiction therefore I can't tell you how realistically this treats the situation, but I can tell you it felt real to me and it was handled in what seemed to be an honest mature way.

The use of flashbacks in this movie are both a positive and a negative. They work in the sense that they allow us to see in the minds of the characters. At times like this we would be stopping to think "how did we get here?" These flashbacks let us look back at this as the characters would making us become more involved with their emotions. On the other hand the transitions between flashbacks and modern time are not always very clear. This causes the movie to get unnecessarily hard to follow at times. There were important scenes that at first I thought were flashbacks, but ended up not being so. This is not done in a thought-provoking way but instead feels clumsy.


This movie also has a problem with feeling longer than it is. Much of this comes from the fact that the movie goes for long stretches without anything remotely happy. Many great depressing movies have happy scenes or comedic scenes to lighten the load for the audience and give them brief moments of relief. This also comes from the fact that we are watching Nic struggle through the same things over and over again. Sadly after so many times of seeing this with no relief, the audience simply grows weary and tired of watching. Two hours of this makes the movie pass by really slowly towards the end. However with how moving much of this film is, I can still recommend it easily, but don't watch it if you are either depressed or restless.          

-Michael J. Ruhland