LaBeouf’s semi-life story makes for honestly raw cinema
Like many, I was first introduced to Shia LaBeouf through Even Stevens, the popular Disney channel sitcom which made him a name back in the early 00’s. I then watched as the film world took note of him with the likes of Holes and Disturbia, both vehicles which showcased an affable Tom Hanks-like quality and suggested that the kid could really act. Transformers launched him into superstardom for a time, until a bout with sequelitis in and out of the franchise began to tarnish his star. What goes up, must come down as the old saying goes, and that certainly proved true as LaBeouf found himself the subject of tabloid fodder thanks to multiple errors in judgment where his off-screen behavior was concerned. By all accounts, his highly-publicized breakdown (in which he famously turned himself into a performance art exhibit) should have ensured the actor never made it onto a movie set again. But LaBeouf was determined to show he was more than a flash in the pan child star and in the last few years, has turned in a collection of performances that show a true artistry. With his latest, the semi-autobiographical Honey Boy, the actor co-stars in a movie from his own script for what may be the culmination of the bumpiest of careers.
In Honey Boy, a successful 20-something actor named Otis (Lucas Hedges) is enjoying a thriving career that’s hindered only by an increasingly problematic drug and alcohol dependency that’s accompanied by his off-screen reckless behavior. Forced to complete a stint in rehab, Otis finds himself flashing back to memories of his younger self (Noah Jupe) and the unconventional childhood he experienced while living with his complicated father James (LaBeouf).
So much has been written in the past about the lives of child stars and how their times spent on movie sets exposed them to an early taste of adulthood which greatly impacted their future selves. While Honey Boy acknowledges that life as a child actor isn’t the most normal in terms of consistency, for Otis, it’s probably the most stable element of his life. There are two worlds in Honey Boy’s flashback sequences; the first is the tumultuous one Otis shares with James, an alcoholic rodeo clown coming to grips with the fact that he’ll never amount to anything more in his lifetime. His self-loathing manifests itself through rage-filled outbursts towards his son, as well as the strict enforcement of rules and allowing the impressionable youngster to bear witness to his own destructive nature. It’s only when Otis finds himself on a sound stage and in character, that he is able to be free and engage in the kind of “playtime” falderal most kids his age should be naturally afforded. Watching Otis while he’s acting, it’s hard not to observe a kind of freedom and safety (mixed with a bit of catharsis) that he can’t experience in what should be a loving home life. It’s an observation made all the more sadder in one particular scene when we see the older male actor playing Otis’s father give him a compliment following a take, displaying the kind of support and championing he should be getting from his real-life father, who isn’t even present on the set.
The present day scenes help us to understand what happened to the boy with the crazy dad who essentially had to grow up learning lines and finding his light. When we encounter the grown-up Otis, we see someone trying to dull the pain of a lost childhood; lost, not on the set of a movie, but somewhere in the recesses of the fractured family life which defined him almost as much as his work did. By the time he reaches his 20s, Otis has become a young man whose own real-life social experience has been one of heartache, anger and disappointment, with the only form of refuge being the characters he’s played. It’s through them where he can pretend that Otis doesn’t exist; that the boy who both loves and loathes his father is someone else altogether. Yet these efforts to disappear into any image of life which bore almost no resemblance to the one he was made to go home to at the end of the shooting day, has both aided and stifled him. Otis’s self-destructive behavior can be looked at as more symptom than cause of the life he’s led. Angry and in pain, the grown-up Otis is a portrait of a little boy lost, which the screenplay explores, but never make full-on excuses for. It’s here, in these present-day scenes that Honey Boy reveals itself to be a film about a man whose past is shaped by a collection of identities now forced to face his history and find out who he is.
Each of the three central figures within Honey Boy contribute to making the film as diverting as it is without stealing the spotlight away from one another. Jupe has been a young actor on the radar for the last couple of years, wowing in everything from the heart-tugging Wonder, to the misguided Suburbicon. Here, Jupe proves to be an actor so skilled at interpreting dialogue and character for what is the most challenging and provocative role of his young career. As his older counterpart, Hedges’ screen time might feel less compelling that that of Jupe’s or LaBeouf’s, but the actor’s now-famous knack for turning in one dynamic performance after another results in some of Honey Boy’s most honest moments. All eyes are on LaBeouf however as takes on the role of both the film’s heavy and a reworked version of the man who raised him. Seeing him tackle both challenges head on is a revelation in what is one of the most exquisite and compelling turns of the actor’s career; one filled with the kind of anger and despair that makes a film like Honey Boy soar.
Honey Boy will surely prompt plenty of arguments about the damage done to children who are forced into the limelight at too young an age and the havoc such a life can wreak on them years later. Yet for every Brad Renfro there’s also a Jodie Foster, signifying that a movie set alone isn’t enough to lead an impressionable youth into the darkness of slow self-destruction, so much as the world he/she faces when they go home. Honey Boy does a good job at showing the unpredictable and volatile nature father and son shared and how it forced the latter to grow up at a pace more accelerated than most levels of fame could have achieved. In Otis’ case, acting was probably the lone saving grace of his childhood; an escape from the reality that was his life. But Honey Boy isn’t about the pitfalls of child stardom; it’s about facing the world, and the family you come from, regardless of whether or not they’re in L.A.