Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

Apparently 2019 is the year of quasi-meta meditations on filmmakers’ pasts and careers. There are two key difference between Honey Boy, though, and the likes of Pain and Glory and The Irishman. The first, and most significant, is the runtime: in sharp contrast to The Irishman’s three and a half hour run time, Honey Boy clocks in at a wonderfully economical 94 minutes. The second is that, instead of elderly directors using movies to make a statement about their overall film careers, Honey Boy is a thirtysomething actor telling the story of his experience as a child actor with an emotionally abusive father.

Honey Boy also takes the “meta” aspect of the filmmaking to a different level. The thirtysomething actor is Shia LaBeouf, who wrote the script (his first one for a feature film, and an impressive debut at that) based on his own experience as a child actor, although it’s fictionalized and the names have been changed. Still, it’s an unusual circumstance indeed where LaBeouf plays the part of the fucked up, addict dad, which in effect means he’s playing his own dad. And then, near the end of the film, the actor character (played by Lucas Hedges) actually tells his dad he’s going to make a movie about him.

Actually, this scenario is at least vaguely similar to that of Pain and Glory, in which Antonio Banderas in effect plays the director of that very film (Pedro Almodóvar), after having been directed by him in several films over the past fifty years. Both films are deeply personal ones, but the meta layers go even deeper when an actor is playing his own father. And LaBeouf’s performance is astonishing, given how much abuse he endured, and yet he manages to imbue him with real humanity.

Honey Boy is expertly edited, jumping back and forth between the young actor “Otis” at age 12 (Noah Jupe) and Otis at age 22 (Lucas Hedges). The opening shot features Hedges as the older Otis on the set of a blockbuster film, which is clearly meant to evoke the Transformers franchise, although actual movie titles (or TV show titles) are never uttered in the script. It then flashes back to Otis at 12, in a similar filming setup, only this time he’s getting a pie in the face instead of being thrown away from the camera by an explosion.

Of course, there is little doubt that LaBeouf’s reality is far messier than Honey Boy depicts things, with its clean arcs and themes that don’t tie themselves together seamlessly in real life. Such is the nature of storytelling, though, and Honey Boy does it very well. It’s easy to imagine that making the film was just as therapeutic for LaBeouf himself as was the rehab therapy Hedges takes us through as Otis. Hedges, incidentally, is just as great as we have now long come to expect from him; Noah Jupe as 12-year-old Otis is even better.

LaBeouf depicts Otis’s dad, James, in either case, in 1995 or 2005, although he’s only seen briefly in the later-set scenes. He dominates the scenes from 1995, where the way he raises his son is shockingly fucked up in several ways. With one exception, none of it is physical abuse, as you might expect from a story like this. Instead it’s something a bit more subtle and sinister. He lets his 12-year-old son smoke cigarettes. He attacks Tom (Clifton Collins Jr.), the man in Otis’s life form the Big Brothers and Sisters program, out of jealousy. He and Otis’s mom (Natasha Lyonne, only ever heard on the phone) have an argument in which they refuse to talk to each other, but instead have Otis pass on uniquely fucked up messages for them over the phone. These ultimately become more a series of vignettes that don’t quite allow for real depth of character building, but it remains an impressive overview of a kid actor’s life.

The greatest achievement of Honey Boy, though, is how it makes clear that it would be an oversimplification to call James a villain. Would it even be fair to call him a bad man? He’s a man who does very, very bad things. There is a real sense of the nuance, the ambivalence with which LaBeouf regards his father. The film, directed with a sensitive hand by Alma Har’el, also offers insight into LaBeouf’s behavior over the years, but without overtly absolving him of it. Shia LaBeouf is a flawed man, just as his father was, but it would appear that the greatest differentiation between them is talent. Say what you will about Shia LaBeouf and his motivations, the man has talent to spare. Still all of 33 years old, his potential remains unbounded, and we can only hope to see him in more parts this thoughtful onscreen in the future.

*A man, as his father, addresses a child, as himself.*

Overall: B+