Based on the heartbreaking memoir “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction” by David Sheff and the autobiography “Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines” by his son Nic Sheff, the movie Beautiful Boy shows the struggles of everyday life while Nic struggles with a drug addiction.

“Nic tells his father that crystal meth filled a void in his life. The first time he consumed it, he says, his world went “from black and white to Technicolor,” and he’s reluctant to go back.” says A.O. Scott, New York Times.

While the movie doesn’t focus on why or how Nic was introduced to his  Methamphetamine addiction, it looks into his life while being on many drugs such as Marijuana and Methamphetamine. We get a sense of what his family and day to day life is like, and how his actions and behaviors change continuously. During many years of sacrifice and worry, David Sheff (Steve Carell) and his ex wife Vicky (Amy Ryan) have to help with Nic (Timothée Chalamet) and his addiction as David and Nic live together outside of San Francisco and Vicky lives in Los Angeles.

On the road to get clean, Nic attends many Narcotic Anonymous meetings and rehab centers which helps him recover help him, but the results don’t last. As seen in many drug users, attempting sobriety is usually followed by a relapse. The movie focuses mainly on David and his experience with his son’s rehab cycle. He experiences many different emotions, while surprisingly showing his calm and collected side for the majority of the movie.

Since Beautiful Boy is pretty hard to watch without shedding a tear, the actors had a very personal response while portraying these real people and how they had to go through life. “It really got inside of us… we felt a responsibility, it’s important timely and its universal. I would take that stuff home. I had to brace myself, she [my wife] was getting emotional just hearing stories about the day of shooting, let alone seeing it in a final product.” Carell replied in an interview with Fox 5 Entertainment when asked about how this movie effected him and his connections to his own family and kids.

“I didn’t leave the hotel (after shooting)… I’d go back to the hotel and read another book to try to get myself out of it…. I just stayed quiet, I felt like it felt dangerous out there in the world, let me just stay contained.” Amy Ryan responds in the same interview when asked how she would feel after a day of filming.

While growing up in New York City, Timothée Chalamet stated how he did have friends and knew people who were addicted to drugs and had a first hand experience with this. This influenced his acting while playing Nic on screen. “Young people have such disillusionment with our post-post-post-industrial world, where student debt is crazy and job opportunities are less afforded to people,” he says. “Opiates have become the drug of choice, as opposed to drugs in the ’60s like LSD that amplified your surroundings—-these are drugs that will numb you regardless of how terrible your environment is, and you’re guaranteed the same feeling each time.”

“Beautiful Boy, rather than plumbing the hard emotional depths of addiction, skates on a surface of sentiment and gauzy visual beauty.” A.O. Scott. This is a movie about self perseverance and knowing what you need. The drug epidemic has had a continuously growing impact on America and the world. This impact encourages people to spawn their stories of both perseverance; and tragedy.