【Melodrama Archives】

At this point,Melodrama Archives Shia LaBeouf's as famous for playing Shia LaBeouf as he is for any of his other roles. He's constantly performing as himself in public, whether that means wearing a paper bag to the red carpet or inviting the public to watch him watch his own movies.

Honey Boy, in a lot of ways, feels like the logical extension of that art. It's written by LaBeouf, based on his own experiences as a child star, with LaBeouf playing the fictionalized version of his own father. It's so meta, there's a scene LaBeouf has in this very screenplay explained to him by an actor (Lucas Hedges) playing an analogue of his own mid-'00s self.

But Honey Boyis no smirky stunt. It comes across like a deeply sincere effort on LaBeouf's part to exorcise some of his demons. And if it sometimes feels like a very elaborate therapy session, and not much more? Well, you can't accuse LaBeouf of not trying. We should all be so willing to reckon with our issues.

Most of the film takes place around 1995, when Otis is 12. His work seems to consist largely of cheesy Disney Channel-style movies, but he's well-liked by the cast and crew, and starting to get famous enough that strangers are recognizing him. After work, he goes home to a run-down one-bedroom motel room he shares with his father, James, an ex-felon who's affably neglectful at best and outright abusive at worst.

Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place) plays the younger Otis, and he is the single best reason to seek out Honey Boy. Otis is a character at odds with himself – trying simultaneously to project a grown-up cool and cling to the last vestiges of his childhood innocence – and Jupe conveys those contradictions through a widening of his eyes or a slump of his shoulders. Not a moment of his performance rings false, though I hope for his sake that his real experiences as a child star are more pleasant than the ones he's playing here.

LaBeouf has the flashier role as James, a former rodeo clown who's just charismatic enough to win over people who should know better. The actor (and the script he wrote) takes pains to show James's capacity for both empathy and cruelty, and he commits fully to James's colorful personality. But he can't seem to lose himself in the role, and I couldn't either. To the end, James feels less like a person than a projection of a person.

Or maybe that's just right. Director Alma Har'el frequently uses blurred boundaries (between past and present, sets and reality, dreams and waking life) to tell this story about other blurred boundaries (between father and son, money and affection, trauma and recovery). In the adult Otis' case, this often takes the form of nightmares or montages that only reveal themselves to be real or not real a few minutes in.

For child Otis, though, Honey Boytends to muddy those distinctions in less showy but more disturbing ways. One scene has Otis acting out an argument between his parents, because they refuse to talk on the phone with one another; another has him sharing a moment with his TV dad that he yearns to have with his real one.

It becomes no wonder that this kid grew up to be an adult buckling under a weight he can barely bring himself to admit he's carrying. ("My dad isn't the reason I drink," he scoffs during a court-mandated therapy session. "He's the reason I work.") Or that that adult, in turn, eventually decided to work through those issues by turning them into a screenplay for himself to perform.

James probably wouldn't be a fan of reliving ancient history. "Stop bringing up the past," he grouses to his son, late in the movie. "I can't get out from under it." What James does not have the self-awareness to realize – but LaBeouf does – is that no one else can, either. And that refusing to bring it up won't save him, or anyone else, from what's already happened.