Beautiful Boy - addiction is awful but not interesting

 

It's the first thing I've seen Timothee Chalamet in. There was foreshadowing five minutes in. Steve Carell finds a paperback copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned on his son's desk. They were really playing up Chalamet's looks.

I sat through Beautiful Boy, now available on Amazon Prime. It was dreary and repetitive as any movie about drug addiction is bound to be. It was hard to mourn the lost potential of a promising young man when you can see right in front of you that he got a book and movie deal out of it. His family was surprisingly wealthy to begin with. What did he need potential for?

Timothee Chalamet smiles as he reads an especially bad Charles Bukowski poem in a university class. "This man has saved my life multiple times," he says.

Oddly, he reads the poem from a copy of Factotum which was a novel. I don't remember there being a poem in there. But the novel was about working and we never see these guys work. How did Nic (Chalamet) get money when he was out on the street in the throes of drug addiction? We don't see the nuts and bolts of homelessness and addiction.

We do see that Chalamet is one of those guys who folds books back when he reads them.

I've known people who have survived drug addiction and some who didn't survive. Some were working class, some middle class. I work with a woman who watched her son die of an overdose while waiting for paramedics. I don't know why people start taking drugs in the first place.

There was a woman I knew, a recovering anorexic who put on a lot of weight at one point. She begged an acquaintance to score her some meth to lose weight. He had been in prison for selling cocaine and even he was aghast. Even if he knew where to find it he wouldn't have gotten it for her. She thought he was worried that she would turn him in and kept assuring him he could trust her. So I know that some people start using drugs out of sheer idiocy.