I will make a film about you.
The rehabilitation process of Otis (Lucas Hedges) ends with this premise.
Otis is a young and famous actor who, after yet another arrest for drunkenness, finds himself forced to agree to enter a rehab.
Here he will have the opportunity to think back to his childhood (Noah Jupe plays him as a boy) and above all to his relationship with his father James (Shia LaBeouf).
Can a personal story become universal? Given the results of Honey boy the answer is definitely yes.
In reality, LaBeouf is behind Alma Har'el's first fiction film.
Honey b oy, in fact, it is a deeply autobiographical story.
The actor decided to stage his childhood, marked by an alcoholic and heroin addict father and by mental and psychological abuse but also his present as an actor who had problems with the police several times.
The risk was that a film for fans only would emerge.
Honey boy, on the other hand, is an excellent example of how cinema can be a real form of therapy and yet, at the same time, it is a vivid, intense and poetic testimony of child abuse.
Har'el has made a film capable of depicting an entire reality, that of a marginal and marginalized America, made up of veterans, alcoholics, losers, rejects of society and prostitutes.
The squalid motel where Otis and James live, the narrow and suffocating place where their psychotherapy takes place, is a direct relative of the one seen in A dream called Florida (http://www.euroroma.net/6731/TUTTI/the-florida-project-un-sogno-call-florida-lennesimo-meraviglioso- film-by-a-director-semplicemente-immenso.html) and it is certainly no coincidence that children are at the center of both films.
Of course the context changes but we must certainly not be fooled by the lights of Hollywood in which Otis moves.
Behind them lies the violence of a father who takes out all his frustrations on his son.
As Otis himself will say, the only thing his father taught him is the pain.
And yet, despite this, there is no anger or resentment in LaBeouf's confession and indeed the father-son relationship is also capable of acts of complicity and affection, just as there is no shortage of poetic moments entrusted in particular way to the delicate friendship that Otis forms with a girl next door (FKA Twigs).
With the difference that, as the photos in the closing credits remind us, behind the fiction lies a painful reality.
The rehabilitation process of Otis (Lucas Hedges) ends with this premise.
Otis is a young and famous actor who, after yet another arrest for drunkenness, finds himself forced to agree to enter a rehab.
Here he will have the opportunity to think back to his childhood (Noah Jupe plays him as a boy) and above all to his relationship with his father James (Shia LaBeouf).
Can a personal story become universal? Given the results of Honey boy the answer is definitely yes.
In reality, LaBeouf is behind Alma Har'el's first fiction film.
Honey b oy, in fact, it is a deeply autobiographical story.
The actor decided to stage his childhood, marked by an alcoholic and heroin addict father and by mental and psychological abuse but also his present as an actor who had problems with the police several times.
The risk was that a film for fans only would emerge.
Honey boy, on the other hand, is an excellent example of how cinema can be a real form of therapy and yet, at the same time, it is a vivid, intense and poetic testimony of child abuse.
Har'el has made a film capable of depicting an entire reality, that of a marginal and marginalized America, made up of veterans, alcoholics, losers, rejects of society and prostitutes.
The squalid motel where Otis and James live, the narrow and suffocating place where their psychotherapy takes place, is a direct relative of the one seen in A dream called Florida (http://www.euroroma.net/6731/TUTTI/the-florida-project-un-sogno-call-florida-lennesimo-meraviglioso- film-by-a-director-semplicemente-immenso.html) and it is certainly no coincidence that children are at the center of both films.
Of course the context changes but we must certainly not be fooled by the lights of Hollywood in which Otis moves.
Behind them lies the violence of a father who takes out all his frustrations on his son.
As Otis himself will say, the only thing his father taught him is the pain.
And yet, despite this, there is no anger or resentment in LaBeouf's confession and indeed the father-son relationship is also capable of acts of complicity and affection, just as there is no shortage of poetic moments entrusted in particular way to the delicate friendship that Otis forms with a girl next door (FKA Twigs).
With the difference that, as the photos in the closing credits remind us, behind the fiction lies a painful reality.
