Honey Boy
Writer and performer Shia LaBeouf works closely with filmmaker Alma Har’el on this artful and soul-baring examination of the lingering effects of emotional abuse.
When 12-year-old Otis starts to find success as a child television star in Hollywood, his ex-rodeo-clown father returns to serve as his guardian. When Otis isn’t on set charming audiences, he spends his days with his father at an extended-stay motel on the edge of the city, enduring his overbearing father’s abuse. HONEY BOY follows two threads of time, watching father and son’s contentious relationship and their attempts to mend it across the course of a decade.
This stunning collaboration between screenwriter/star Shia LaBeouf and director Alma Har’el paints a painful yet inspired portrait of growing up. LaBeouf’s script dives deep into Otis’s psychology to mine uncomfortable truths about the lasting effects of abuse, while Har’el crafts an exciting, stylish film that never loses sight of its warm, heartfelt centre. Two outstanding young actors, Lucas Hedges and Noah Jupe, play Otis at different ages, and their intense performances reveal an emotionally raw character driven, simultaneously and paradoxically, by anger and the desire to forgive.