Metacritic reviews

Strong, committed performances and the upsetting ring of reality anchor a highly-personal film which cycles through addiction, relapse and rehab in an episodic way, each high as inevitable as the low which follows.

Beautiful Boy, made by the Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”), from a script by Luke Davies, is scrupulous and tenderly wounding — a drama that seizes and holds you.

Chalamet, a heartthrob unafraid to tackle unglamorous material, so embodies the tragic struggles of a drug-addled young man it’s a wonder he made it through the production, while Carell’s melancholic eyes absorb every detail. It’s a haunting two-hander that allows their talent to tower over everything else.

Beautiful Boy keeps you strung on that line for nearly all of its run time, and sometimes it feels less like a movie than an endurance test — one that’s lovingly, meticulously made but almost too much like real life: an impressionistic series of highs and lows, relapses and recoveries, without the necessary anchor of a cohesive arc.

The detachment at work in Beautiful Boy suggests an attempt to speak clearly and truthfully, to resist the clichés of the addiction drama while acknowledging that those clichés can hardly be rewritten.

By working in such a deliberately muted key, the emotional payoffs we’re conditioned to require from a story like this never quite arrive, and Van Groeningen never finds a workable substitute for them.

There are moments of crushing emotional weight but as the film progresses, they start to carry less power.

Far from perfect, and very rarely offering us anything unexpected, Beautiful Boy is nevertheless a well-mounted depiction of the terrible cycle of substance abuse.

As enacted here by unquestionably fine actors, this story does not emerge as compelling or convincing, and the film is aggravatingly narrow-minded in its interests. However, if one stays with it all the way to the end, it is absolutely worth sitting still for the end credits, over which is played a monologue by Nic which is the best thing in the picture.

If this was Nic’s story from the start I wouldn’t know a better avenue existed. And if it remained David’s throughout I could continue seeing the teen as the tragic cautionary tale he should be rather than the selfish plot device he becomes. On a purely aesthetic level, however, Beautiful Boy succeeds.