There's a lot to admire in Beautiful Boy on a performance level, but Carell and Chalamet's work is often buried in frustrating filmmaking.

The film holds you at arm's length, never quite letting you all the way in, never fully showing the ugliest or rawest moments... Van Groeningen takes an extremely granular approach to non-linear storytelling that works until it doesn't.

With lesser performances, it would crumble under the manipulative weight of unearned gravitas, but these two actors transcend the material at every turn.