Quartile rating: 8.5/10 · 2 ratings
After he and his first wife separate, journalist David Sheff struggles to help their teenage son, who goes from experimenting with drugs to becoming devastatingly addicted to methamphetamine.
Beautiful Boy rests almost entirely on the strength of its two lead performances — Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell both deliver raw, emotionally devastating work that elevates the material. The cinematography is competent and occasionally lyrical but unremarkable. The plot, while drawn from real memoirs, follows a fairly familiar addiction-and-recovery narrative cycle (relapse, hope, relapse) without finding a dramatically fresh structural approach. Novelty is limited — it covers well-trodden addiction drama territory and sits comfortably within established biopic conventions. The ending is honest and restrained rather than falsely redemptive, which suits the material, but doesn't fully resolve the emotional tensions built up across the film.