Beautiful Boy review — Stellar performances have difficulty breaking through the excruciatingly glum cycle of addiction, recovery and relapse.

Along with cooler temperatures, falling leaves and hurricanes, autumn ushers in a time of solemn, serious and significant films at your local cineplex, or, more accurately put, your local art house theater. These are films about important topics like substance abuse, racism and mental illness, many populated with A-list actors eager for a chance to show their full range, and perhaps get a benevolent nod from the awards gods.

Beautiful Boy is one such film. You don’t really see a movie like this to be entertained, you go to be enlightened or perhaps feel profound emotional catharsis. If there’s not enough drama, conflict, pain or futility in your everyday life, films like Beautiful Boy will drench you in it. It’s up to you if you want to spend your time and money that way.

Based on a true story, the script for Beautiful Boy was taken from two memoirs of drug abuse: Beautiful Boy, by concerned father David Shiff, played by Steve Carell, and Tweak, written by Shiff’s addict son Nic Sheff, played by Timothée Chalamet. Both actors are at the top of their game, and give heartfelt, moving performances.

But they’re dealing with relentlessly repetitive and grim material. Son starts using. Dad finds out. Son goes into recovery. Son relapses. Son starts using again. Dad finds out…and so on, for almost two hours of the painful and repetitive relapse and recovery cycle.

Viewers yearn for a glimmer of humor or comic relief, and when none of that appears to be forthcoming, we long for the kid to finally hit bottom already, so there can be some kind of resolution and we can all go home and be depressed.

I’m sure Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen had the best of very serious intentions, but it’s unclear what exactly he wanted to accomplish with the film. A tribute to a father’s love and human resilience, perhaps? I’m just not sure the uplifting message can break through all the glum redundancy.

Rated R

1 Hour 52 Minutes

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Beautiful Boy review — Stellar performances have difficulty breaking through the excruciatingly glum cycle of addiction, recovery and relapse.