A young actor’s stormy childhood and early adult years as he struggles to reconcile with his father and deal with his mental health.
“Honey Boy” was a sleeper hit to me just as I’m sure it will be to many who take the time to see it. Shia Labeouf has had a few films that have been fun to watch including “The Peanut Butter Falcon” (it is definitely worth a watch, trust me) but nothing memorable since “Holes.” “Honey Boy” began with a pie to the face and honestly, I chuckled to myself thinking that was the best metaphor for what the film was going to play out like. It was quite the opposite. There is a hidden genius behind the eyes of the man that people still recognize as Beans from “Even Stevens” and “Honey Boy” will make this apparent just as “The Peanut Butter Falcon” started to do.
Shia Labeouf plays James Lort, a tweaked version, not a full version of Shia’s own father. A struggling, recovering alcoholic with big dreams, he wants to live through his own son. Lort is a veteran who seems to walk the fine line between having a heart and wanting the best for his son, or wanting to ride away on the motorcycle of his and live his own life.
The sense of struggle that Shia brings to the character is one that can be felt in any sense by anyone. Lort is perpetually broke and struggling to make it for day to day being fueled only by cigarettes and memories of before his life stops at the dead-end in which he currently resides.
Deja Vu infects this film in terms of its characters but that is the beauty of it’s writing. Noah Jupe inhabits the character Otis, Lort’s own son. Jupe plays a young and watered-down version of Lort which is ironic seeing as how that’s what a young boy does, he is his father’s shadow with less defined emotional and moral characteristics. The boy is struggling in his own way, not with money but he is short on affection that has been afforded to him. He has a constant per diem when it comes to cash but he is in the red when it comes to love and it shows. He would do anything to command his father’s attention but all the money in the world doesn’t seem to help.
Otis’s behaviors seem to carry over into his adult life as we begin the film as well as end it with an older version of it which is played by Lucas Hedges. The less defined features of his youth, as well as his innocence, have been replaced with what feels like a replica of his father. The sins of the father, in this instance, are now the sins of the son in every sense. What he underwent in his childhood with his father has now bubbled up and become an overcast on his life and his career.
This film is one about family and what expectations and want for acknowledgment and affection will create in a toxic relationship. The notion that family cannot do wrong is flipped on its head in this film and shown to you in the raw. “Honey Boy” is a blunt look at fatherhood and what it is to be a child in a dysfunctional world, surrounded by dysfunctional people and the complications that come with carrying that into adulthood.
In select theaters Friday, November 22nd
