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Critics Consensus: Beautiful Boy sees Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell delivering showcase work that's often powerful enough to make up for the story's muted emotional impact.
Critic Consensus: Beautiful Boy sees Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell delivering showcase work that's often powerful enough to make up for the story's muted emotional impact.
The movie doesn't seem to be playing near you.
All Critics (196) | Top Critics (37) | Fresh (133) | Rotten (63)
Homelessness isn't Timothée Chalamet draped handsomely across a diner; it's contemptuous glances and shame.
The leads are superb, buoyed by Amy Ryan as Nic's mom, Maura Tierney as his stepmother, and LisaGay Hamilton in a moving cameo.
When the family dynamics are front and center, "Beautiful Boy" resonates, as it reflects the ugliness of addiction and the long tail it wags.
"Beautiful Boy" is a welcome corrective, of sorts. If only it weren't quite so . . . clean.
Imperfect yet affecting.
A test of an actor is playing someone who's split in so many ways that he moves forward while looking backwards and vice versa, and Chalamet is already a master.
Carell & Chalamet make a straightforward script and distractingly hamfisted soundtrack watchable.
Despite its slightly dreamy aesthetic, Felix Van Groeningen's film unstintingly explores the strange world of addiction therapy, which at one point boils down to a cold-blooded severing of ties.
The lack of any kind of third act doesn't even allow it to pass for a solid "disease of the week" picture.
This is harrowing stuff, to be sure, but the movie for the most part feels oddly becalmed.
Deeply touching.
If the film ultimately becomes a little enamoured with the relentless grind of this process, Carell and Chalamet are good enough to see it through.
BEAUTIFUL BOY (2 Stars) Ugh. This isn't even a movie. There's no real story. It just keeps repeating itself to death and then ends. Yes, it mirrors the cycle of addiction that plague so many people, but that doesn't make for good storytelling. Timothée Chalamet does some great work when portraying his character's addiction to heroin, but I never believed him as a meth addict. There's a distinction that I don't think he quite captured. Steve Carell here has that annoying high pitch in his voice we typically see from Tom Cruise when he plays an end-of-his-rope character. Major points deducted for the terrible choice to edit a montage to "Sunrise/Sunset" from FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. Who thought that worked? I want names!!
Super Reviewer
It felt like it was taking this a long time to really find its groove and then I checked my phone to see where we were time-wise and it was an hour and a half in. Needless to say, Beautiful Boy has no groove to be found. Having not read the source material this may immediately mean less to me, but the structuring of this story as its done in the film doesn't help. It's not hard to see what the film is trying to do in telling the two parallel perspectives of the father and the son caught in this battle with addiction, but in doing so what results is a disjointed mess of a movie (at least upon first watch). We never spend long enough periods with either of the characters to garner any real sympathy for them-not until the end anyway when Carell brings it all home. It's kind of a weird movie too, but worse is the fact it's a boring weird movie. Every single aspect of these people's lives revolves around coping with addiction and addiction itself, but there has to be more in order to have the audience invest in these lives. I adore Steve Carell and Timothï¿ 1/2 (C)e Chalamet seems like a genuinely nice, cool, and grateful kid, but even their strenuous performances feel exhausting and void of any tangible pathos.
The story's impact is almost diluted by the film's editing (with its jumps in time and flashbacks within flashbacks) and questionable choice of music, which makes it kind of emotionally stiff, even though that is compensated by two amazing performances by Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell.
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