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Beautiful Boy is not a fun movie to watch. Although arrestingly realistic, it can be a pretty painful ordeal to endure. In fact, it feels like such an immaculate representation of what it must be like to live through a horrific tragedy that one feels uneasy, restless, and depressed for hours afterward. So – know that going into the theater.

As the story begins, a college freshman named Sammy is calling his parents at home to check in. Mom Kate (Maria Bello) is a typical concerned parent, wanting her child to do well; Dad Bill (Michael Sheen) asks is Sam needs any money and is doing well, and he hangs up. The next morning, the terrible news: Sam has shot 18 students and teachers in his college before killing himself.

The movie wisely shows us nothing of the massacre; its focus is on the aftermath. Kate and Bill are staked out by the media. They escape to her brother's house to live with him, his wife, and their young son. They are vilified on television and online, particularly on Sam's Facebook. Their parenting is constantly questioned. In short time, they are questioning themselves: Did they make this happen? Kate and Bill had been drifting apart for some time, to the point where Bill was actively looking for a new place to live. The tragedy doesn't immediately bring them together, and it doesn't immediately drive them farther apart. Rather, they each drift some more, apart not just from each other but from reality. They blame themselves. They blame each other. They don't blame anyone. They continue on.

There's hardly a note in the movie that doesn't ring true. These characters are not caricatures, and they aren't archetypes, either. Both Bill and Kate seem completely believable, and with the tragedies in places such as Columbine and Virginia Tech, they are characters who very much feel like they could be living next door to us right now. That they are trashed and widely hated is understandable, and luckily neither character lacks the self-awareness to grasp why people are so mad. Bill reasons that the public wants to believe that the couple feels bad about what their son has done. They do, of course. They show their deepening anguish in different ways, but their devastation is complete. Their lives are seemingly ruined.

But this is not a movie without any hope. The subject matter is gruesome, but it's not tiresome. What we see are real reactions from realistic people. There are no real good guys, just a couple of people who've suddenly lost their way. Whether they regain it is almost immaterial, just as it's almost immaterial whether they regain it together. For us, it's the journey from their discovery through the passage of a week or so that's the true endgame. Neither does the film wallow in sentimentality for the sake of making us feel good. The true moments of joy are fleeting, just as they can be in real life. Even a dark movie can contain passionate performances.

In this nearly terrifying age where our children are growing significantly faster than we want them to, fear, anxiety, and near paranoia starts to overtake the best of parents. In America, we have witnessed, in this generation alone, some of the most evil ever conducted by mankind in all of history; the fall of the twin towers, the war in Iraq, the shooting massacre in Virginia Tech, all terrible staples in my memory and I'm not even thirty yet. What other horrors will this lifetime bring? As a new father, I want to wrap my daughter Sophia in a bubble and never let her see the light of day for fear of what she may either endure or be influenced by. Shawn Ku's Beautiful Boy examines the aftermath of a young man, Sammy, that commits a mass shooting at his school and ultimately takes his own life. Bill (Michael Sheen) and Kate (Maria Bello) are your average married couple. Held back by grief, guilt, and rage, Bill and Kate undertake the scrutiny from the presses and the families as the sole reasons for young Sammy's demise. How could you move on from a nightmare you couldn't wake up from? Ku takes on the story with ferocity, examining a vast subject, which perks our ears up and raises our eyebrows. Ultimately Ku fails at getting down to the emotional center of this tale. The narrative picks up rather quickly from the beginning but loses pace and theme quickly. It's not necessarily a failure on Ku's part or co-writer Michael Armbruster, simply not as evolutionary in terms of independent filmmaking. The premise is enticing enough to withstand its flaws and it does have moments of brilliance, especially in the scenes following the shooting. However, it's the powerful performances of Michael Sheen and Maria Bello that hook the viewer in and safely guide throughout. Michael Sheen delivers his finest performance since his towering work in Stephen Frears' The Queen. Sheen attacks the character unlike anything seen from him before. He is engaged and delivers the emotional peril of a heartbroken father attempting to pick up the pieces in the most magnificent ways possible. Sheen invites the viewer into his world, showing the ugliest and worst parts about him, and letting us form our own opinion. Downright brilliant. Maria Bello, who I fell in love with in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, handles Kate with care, love, and ease. Bello's precision and dedication to the craft stands nearly on the top of most actresses today. It also equals one of her finest works in years. Her heart-on- the-sleeve approach not only allows us to respect Kate but it transforms her into a clear sign and example of masterclass acting. Where it can easily be taken over the top, Bello holds it right to the edge, never pushing us over. In a rare and personal plea, these two performances should well be on the Oscar radar. As a small and obviously personal film, Michael Sheen and Maria Bello deliver clear and cut, two of the most worthy performances of award's recognition this year. It's reminiscent of the same feeling Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams delivered in their powerful works in last year's Blue Valentine. In his briefest scenes, Kyle Gallner (Sammy) boils his performance to the rim and delivers a clever and daring performance. Beautiful Boy has raw and emotional power without falling all over itself with melodrama, but it does come up short in some narrative regards. But with these two talented actors in tow, the film will knock your socks right off in simple artistry.

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It seems that Hollywood, especially lately, has been in the habit of giving us films dealing with parents suffering the loss of a child. We see them scream, we see them cry, we see them go through the same routine. Beautiful Boy takes this theme and puts a unique, much more tragic, spin on it. Michael Sheen and Maria Bello play parents who lose their college-age son, but worse is their son died after shooting up his school. So along with them having to grieve the loss of their boy, they have to suffer the scrutiny of the media attacking their son and them publicly, along with fighting themselves in trying to figure out what led to this awful thing happening. They fight with whether they're responsible, whether they should take time to grieve or try to go back into things and as many other things as you can think of in this struggle for normalcy in understanding when everything else is fighting against them.

Of course anything dealing with themes like this gives way to a lot of opportunity for melodrama. There's a subplot with a novelist that is very silly and expected and a few other scenes that rang false, but for the most part the film was surprisingly honest and from the heart. These characters suffer in real ways and even though the film initially splits the two into stereotypes, Bello having the hysterical screams and disbelief and Sheen with the stunned silence, as it progresses they both go through phases of devastation, denial and just a need to understand and get past it. It doesn't do anything particularly unique in how they grieve, but the two performers make you feel everything these characters go through. They bring a lot of power to their roles and it can definitely hit very hard at times.

Both Sheen and Bello have always been fine actors who rarely get the chance to demonstrate their immense talents. Here they are given full opportunity to let their skills show and neither of them hesitate to do so. Whether they are having a shouting match in a hotel room, consoling one another in tears or just silently trying to deal with this huge tragedy, it's hard to take your eyes off either of them. It definitely goes down the expected path, but these two make it well worth watching with their powerhouse performances and I did admire the slight turn on what had kind of become a tired setup. Making the son this kind of person added a lot of layers to the struggle these two had to go through.

It can be hard to evaluate a film such as this. Its striking realism is both a gift and a curse: seeing its protagonists in their naturally empty and shell-shocked state for much of the film doesn't make for entertaining viewing - nonetheless its emotional scenes pack such a weighty punch, heightened by Sheen and Bello's terrific performances, you can truly feel their agony.

While the fallout from the unconscionable number of tragedies that inspired this film tends to focus mainly on the perpetrator, then on the victims and their families, "Beautiful Boy" wisely forces its audience to think about the side of the story that is rarely heard.

The first forty-five minutes of Beautiful Boy, I must admit, were minutes that included strong acting and harsh realism. The whole plot of the film is hard to really grab a hold of and decipher it, since really, it is a story that is just so hard to comprehend. But one too many things go wrong with this film that are results of maybe the film's own personal setbacks, and the screenplay's too.

Bill (Sheen) and Kate (Bello) are a middle-class couple with a son in his Freshman year of College. The son is Sam Carroll, played by Kyle Gallner who, if you recall, was in Kevin Smith's most recent work Red State as the horny teenager who fell pray to a radical, religious cult. Sam is troubled, ignored, and underestimated. Bill and Kate are shocked and in denial when they get the news the next day that their son walked into his morning class, with a handgun, and opened fire on his teacher and classmates.

Now is the part we rarely think about when it comes to tragedies like school shootings - the aftermath for the shooter's parents. Their whole life has just went from mediocre to worse in a matter of a second. They are unfairly blamed, stamped with the seal of "bad parents," and are now trying to save their already dying marriage by holding onto the only one who knows their pain.

It's heartbreaking to think about both of the affected sides in an incident like this. Not only have many lost their life, but the ones who were the parents of the killed now have to go on and struggle to find their ability to cope with the sudden change. It's hard on everyone.

Michael Sheen and Maria Bello create pretty well acted chemistry, but ultimately, the film is its own worst enemy. Beautiful Boy was shot was a 16mm camcorder meaning that the picture quality isn't stellar compared to what is the norm now. That doesn't bring the film down as much as it is how the film works with its low budget. The color scheme is nothing but bleak - gray and black only hit the screen, which might be parallel to the subject matter I'm not sure. But it just seems like it wasn't meant to be this way.

The directing by Shawn Ku doesn't do too much justice either. During some of the intense and believable fight scenes between Sheen and Bello, they are usually victim to "swift pans" which is where a shot, instead of cutting to the other person talking it just spins right over to that person. It's sloppy, and is extremely distracting from what the film is trying to show.

The screen writing saves the film majorly here, yet it lacks one fatal flaw - it's emotionless. We feel sad and a little gloomy, sure, but just thinking about the premise might have made people shed a few tears. The film is free from waterworks, and this is coming from a guy who cries during My Girl, Stand By Me, and Toy Story 3.

It might seem like I'm being way too critical, but once you get past those minor setbacks, Beautiful Boy truly is a pretty good film. It explores a field rarely shown and thought about. We don't really think about the parents of the murderer, or how they are affected.

One sub-plot I wish the film would've explored was maybe having one of the neighbor's kids being killed and then the aftermath of between the couple of the killer and the couple of the victim. Imagine the victim's couple was close friends with the shooter's, and then think about how much of a war would've went on with the neighbors. I feel that that would've made a great little addition to a film already very limited.

Beautiful Boy is a good first effort for a plot like this, and hopefully, more films will explore this topic with a heftier budget and further pursuing of the story would occur. There is a film coming out pretty soon called We Need to Talk About Kevin, and from reading the plot and details of it, it seems Beautiful Boy wanted to be something just like that. It will most likely suffer by comparison when that comes out, when really, its setbacks are some that you just can't really overcome.

Starring: Michael Sheen, Maria Bello, and Kyle Gallner. Directed by: Shawn Ku.