Review: Honey Boy Exudes the Erratic Passion of a Memory Being Made

In Alma Har’el’s film, Shia LaBeouf plays an avatar of his father as an expressionistic act of self-therapy.

Honey Boy
Photo: Amazon Studios

Enough time has passed for Shia LaBeouf’s notorious performance art projects of the early aughts to have been mostly forgotten, but anyone still baffled by his high-profile antics and caustic attitude toward his stardom may find answers to a lot of questions in Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy, a roman à clef written by LaBeouf that defies easy description. A coming-of-age story split between a young actor’s breakout as a child star and his breakdown as a young man, the film darts with the erratic passion of a memory being made, recalling a timeline of behind-the-scenes trauma that shaped an abused and exploited figure.

Honey Boy clearly draws stylistic inspiration from Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, which starred LaBeouf as the rat-tailed leader of a traveling band of misfits. Oversaturated purples and yellows bathe Otis (played by Noah Jupe as a 12-year-old and Lucas Hedges in his early 20s), especially throughout the film’s depiction of his rising star. Har’el clearly sees the sleaze in stardom, every neon streak of Natasha Braier’s cinematography bringing a sickly pallor to the complexion of a kid who freely bums cigarettes and practices his parts with method-actor intensity. Honey Boy’s opening sequence, a montage that cuts between the adult Otis’s on-set stuntwork and a drunk-driving accident, exudes a dreamy quality as the severity of the real collision blurs in the actor’s own mind with the falsity of his profession.

As the adult Otis enters court-appointed rehab and struggles not to air his demons to a counselor (Laura San Giacomo), we glimpse his younger self being shaped by his relationship with his father, James (LaBeouf). A Vietnam War veteran and former rodeo clown with a bulging beer gut and a mullet that creeps up into a receding widow’s peak, the man looks comical at first glance, not unlike a redneck Ben Franklin with his hair and wire-frame spectacles. Almost immediately, however, the tension between the father and son is evident in James’s endlessly simmering rage. Openly envious of his son’s budding Hollywood success, James must cope with his contradictory role as a father who should be caring for his son, all the while needing to handle the kid’s professional affairs as his employee.

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LaBeouf plays an avatar of his father as an expressionistic act of self-therapy. James is terrifyingly unpredictable, lovingly playful toward his son in one moment and explosively violent in the next. James’s omnidirectional anger seethes behind even the calmest interactions, and LaBeouf’s overwhelming performance informs and enhances Jupe’s. Otis speaks to his father with a trembling voice, conveying his fear of having spat out the right sentence—which is to say, the one that won’t trigger James’s anger. Honey Boy regularly shows Otis’s at work, doing pratfalls and other physical stunts, all the while being carefully monitored by professionals, but behind closed doors, James’s bouts of abuse shatter the boy’s sense of safety. The man’s slaps are mixed at deafening levels in the sound design, compounding his sudden and shocking outbursts whenever Otis has the nerve to remind his father that he’s the only reason the man has a job anywhere near Hollywood.

Perhaps most impressive about LaBeouf’s performance is how he modulates James’s intemperance with dashes of deep empathy. The man struggles with sobriety, genuinely attempting to turn his life around for the sake of his son, and the scenes depicting his AA meetings give way to soft-spoken monologues in which James bluntly explains his own history of abuse, committed by and to himself. LaBeouf plays these scenes with a weary self-loathing that strips away James’s sense of entitlement around his son and instead digs into his deep reservoirs of shame and horror, recasting the man’s displays of playfulness with Otis as a concentrated effort to break a cycle of abuse that he’s ultimately doomed to perpetuate.

LaBeouf presents the good and the bad without judgment, and it lends Honey Boy’s moments of tenderness a brittle nature that makes them all the more heartbreaking. That’s as true of James’s interactions with Otis as it is of the boy’s own efforts to claw at some sense of normalcy in his chaotic life, as in multiple scenes in which he embraces a young neighbor and sex worker (FKA Twigs). Their affection for one another is non-sexual, indicative only of two souls wanting to be loved, not abused. And when Otis leaps up from one of these sessions to grab money for the young woman, the gesture communicates a hopelessly warped notion of domesticity that nonetheless comes off as sweet in its gratefulness. Such scenes complicate what could have been a Felliniesque show of self-apologia, rendering Otis’s—and by extension LaBeouf’s—erratic life without easy answers but with enough earnestness to suggest that he can one day find some measure of peace from the traumatic memories of his youth.

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Score: 
 Cast: Noah Jupe, Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, FKA Twigs, Martin Starr, Laura San Giacomo  Distributor: Amazon Studios  Running Time: 93 min  Rating: R  Year: 2019

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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