Honey Boy movie review & film summary (2019)

Har'el and LaBeouf have collaborated a couple of times before, and it was she who helped structure LaBeouf's script, weaving together the two timelines. Sometimes it's not clear if what's happening is real, a memory, a nightmare, or a scene from one of Otis' movies. This is what trauma can do, how flashbacks can operate. Cinematographer Natasha Braier bathes the film in golden-deep color: it's all lens-flares at sunrise and sunset, pouring over the shabby beauty of Los Angeles' outskirts. 

LaBeouf was so good in this year's "The Peanut Butter Falcon," playing a jittery charming chatterbox, and James in "Honey Boy" adds to the impression that LaBeouf is moving into very interesting territory as an actor, territory uniquely his own. No longer the charming kid, he comes to the screen now grizzled with tough experience, hardened but wiser. LaBeouf has taken painful memories and tried to work through them. He's an actor, and so the best way to understand why his father treated him the way he did is to put on the man's shoes and walk around in them for a while. It's an astonishing performance.

As I watched this painful father-son relationship, John Mayer's song "Daughters" came into my head (unbidden, unasked-for). In the song, Mayer cautions "fathers" to "be good to" their daughters, because "daughters will love like you do." Good advice, John! But then it derails with this terrible advice:

"Boys, you can break
You'll find out how much they can take
Boys will be strong
And boys soldier on."

Those four small lines are basically what is so wrong in our world. Yes, of course, you can "break" boys, but you shouldn't. Broken boys become broken men. "Finding out how much" a boy can take is abuse. Child Otis "finds out how much he can take" and it's a lot, as it happens. But it impacts his ability to function as an adult. By the time he reaches adulthood, his emotional capacity has narrowed to a pinpoint-sized tunnel, and the only thing allowed out is rage. That's what happens when you "break" boys, when you won't hold their hands, show affection, be gentle with them, just like you do with "your daughters." "Honey Boy" is a cry of pain for the neglected boy Otis was, but it is also a cry of pain for James. The most painful truth of all may be that James was doing the best he could. Because what was his father like?