Beautiful Boy

Felix van Groeningen’s first English language feature lays two books on each other: David Sheff’s account of his son and Nic Sheff’s account of himself in Tweak. Writing with Luke Davies, he framed it with the father’s book and dropped the son’s view into it, so scenes rarely announce whose memory you are in. The scrambled chronology came out of the cutting room, not the page. Van Groeningen has described deciding to reshuffle the material and hunt the emotional logic of the film instead of imposing the writer’s cerebral logic. The edit ran seven months, the film was rebuilt more than once, and he brought in longtime editor Nico Leunen to do it. Relapse arrives as a heap out of order rather than a descending line. Timothée Chalamet has said he dropped twenty pounds and stood under a rain machine for eight takes, and that by then your body does not know you are acting. Shooting took place around Los Angeles and San Francisco in spring 2017; his supporting actor nominations came from the Golden Globes, SAG and BAFTA, with none from the Academy. A good fit if you accept relapse shown over and over and closure arriving only as a sentence on a closing card. Not for anyone who wants the film to explain where the addiction came from.