Honey Boy
★★★★☆
Dir: Alma Har’el. Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe, Byron Bowers, Laura San Giacomo, FKA Twigs. 15 cert, 94 mins.
“I’m gonna make a movie about you,” Otis Lort (Lucas Hedges) tells his father in Honey Boy’s final moments. Shia LaBeouf may have changed the names and muddied the details, but his script can only run from the truth for so long – this is a cinematic therapy session. The actor first wrote the film back in 2017, during a stint of court-ordered rehab. He plays his own father (here named James), while he enlists Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges to stand in as his younger self (Otis) at the ages of 12 and 22 respectively. It’s a psychologist’s dream.
Yet, despite this, Honey Boy never lapses into self-pity. In the hands of director Alma Har’el, previously known for her documentary work, the film delicately bears its scars and finds peace by acknowledging how childhood pains can make and break us. We open on the older Otis, who looks into the camera and utters a few helpless cries, before he’s thrown into the air like a piece of litter caught up in a gust of wind. It’s all for show, since he’s on the set of one of his big-budget action films (a clear nod to the Transformers movies). We then see the same stunt repeated with his younger self, then a child star. Trauma has frozen his emotional state; his life feels as outside of his control then as it does now.
A montage, furiously cut together by editors Dominic LaPerriere and Monica Salazar, condenses the familiar parts of the story: addiction, rage, and being on the wrong side of the law. Otis ends up in a rehab facility, where the staff and fellow patients (including roommate Percy, played by Byron Bowers) react to his outbursts and petulance with saintly patience. At first, he rejects his PTSD diagnosis. He struggles to separate his father’s abuse from his love. James can be violent, but most of the damage done is more insipid in nature – it’s in the way he moulds Otis’s image of himself, for example.
Much of the film is spent with Otis and James, alone in their dreary San Fernando Valley motel room. Cinematographer Natasha Braier lights nighttime interiors with a sickly neon that seeps through the curtains and into every corner of the room – a personal hell. Here, the pair of them shift through an ugly, messy stew of emotions. They rage and they weep. They beg for the other’s approval. They strive desperately to assert control over the situation. Jupe tackles the complex material with ease, particularly when he’s forced to relay over the phone an argument between his parents, mimicking each side’s anger and hurt.
With his receding hairline and southern drawl, it’s impossible to know how accurate an impression LaBeouf is doing of his father (if it’s an impression of all). Yet it’s a performance that stills feels startlingly intimate. Who knows what sense of healing Honey Boy may have brought the actor, but its raw humanity serves as a balm, too, for our own wounds – in whatever form they may take.
Stranded in the stars
Lucy in the Sky
★★☆☆☆
Dir: Noah Hawley. Cast: Natalie Portman, Jon Hamm, Zazie Beetz, Dan Stevens, Pearl Amanda Dickson, Ellen Burstyn. 15 cert, 125 mins.
There’s a question that audiences will inevitably ask themselves at the end of Lucy in the Sky: where were the diapers? It’s a lurid piece of gossip that came to dominate the true story of Nasa’s Capt Lisa Nowak. In 2007, she was arrested in Orlando, Florida, and charged with the attempted kidnapping of US Air Force Capt Colleen Shipman, whose boyfriend William Oefelein – also an astronaut – Nowak was having an affair with. She was found dressed in a wig and trench coat, armed with a BB gun, hammer, pepper spray, rubber tubing, and an eight-inch knife. But the police report further claimed that Nowak wore a pair of adult diapers on her overnight drive from Houston to Orlando, so she could avoid having to stop along the way. Her lawyer later denied this had happened, but it was too late. The diapers had become the headline.
Noah Hawley’s film doesn’t claim to tell the truth of the situation. His story is about a fictional Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman), who makes the same cross-country dash, but here it’s explained as being a direct result of her going crazy in outer space. The film opens on Lucy, suspended against inky black, as she looks down at her home planet – a spider’s web of city lights. Somewhere down there is her ordinary life, with her very ordinary husband (Dan Stevens, sporting a sitcom dad moustache). “Just a few more minutes,” she begs, after being told that it’s time to head back.
What can Lucy do with herself now, having faced the depth of her own insignificance? Well, according to Hawley, who wrote the script alongside Brian C Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi, the only way to deal with an existential crisis is to flirt with Jon Hamm (or, to be precise, Jon Hamm playing Lucy’s Nasa colleague Mark Goodwin)
Lucy in the Sky attempts to crank cosmic meaning out of a momentary media obsession. There’s something admirable in the idea of restoring dignity to a woman who, in reality, was diagnosed with several mental and developmental disorders during her trial. But Hawley’s viewpoint feels almost as reductive. Even before Erin (Zazie Beetz) becomes a rival for Mark’s affections, Lucy pins the younger woman as a potential threat to her future at Nasa. Hawley attempts to blame her paranoia on the company’s ingrained sexism, but it’s an under-explored motivation that seems to have mainly been trotted out to shield Lucy from criticism.
Many of Portman’s recent choices (including Vox Lux and Jackie) have seen her drawn towards complex and conflicted women. And Lucy – with an accent borrowed from Holly Hunter and a wig borrowed from the Stranger Things kids – would at first seem like an interesting challenge. But Hawley (best known for his television work on Fargo and Legion) often drowns his star in unnecessary visual trickery, including an ever-shifting aspect ratio to reflect the confines of earthly existence versus the limitlessness of space. The inspiration for the film’s title, the 1967 Beatles song, appears only as a breathy, twee cover. By failing to find the solid ground in Nowak’s story, Lucy in the Sky leaves us stranded in the stars.
Bloated and ungainly
Motherless Brooklyn
★★☆☆☆
Dir: Edward Norton. Cast: Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe. 15 cert, 144 mins.
Twenty years is a long time to sit with an idea. Edward Norton first tried to adapt Jonathan Lethem’s sprawling detective novel when it was published back in 1999. He was a star at his apex then, with two Oscar nominations under his belt. But the project kept falling through. As the years went by, he began to shrink away from Hollywood, returning only at the behest of choice auteurs. Motherless Brooklyn became Norton’s great passion project, doomed to likely never see the light of day. Until now.
Long-delayed endeavours always meet one of two fates: time has either matured its ideas, or left them bloated and ungainly. Motherless Brooklyn, sadly, is marked by the latter. With Lethem’s permission, Norton has transformed the author’s contemporary story into a historical one, set during the gentrification of Harlem in the 1950s. As a lament to a vision of New York City that has slipped out of sight, lost to capitalist interests and systemic racism, Motherless Brooklyn is tender and unfeigned. But its homage to film noir is over-the-top and borderline parodic – at times, it’s more Who Framed Roger Rabbit? than Chinatown.
When private detective Lionel Essrog (Norton) witnesses the death of his boss and father-figure Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), he dedicates himself to finding out who ordered the hit and why. Lionel has Tourette syndrome, which causes verbal outbursts and muscle twitches. He’ll tug compulsively at a loose thread on his sweater, even after his co-worker (Ethan Suplee) warns him: “Quit pulling at it, you’ll make a mess out of it.” In case you hadn’t noticed, his words are symbolic.
The script finds convenient ways for Lionel’s disorder to serve the narrative, yet also grasps the kind of daily frustrations that it can bring. Inevitably, with each interaction with a stranger, Lionel has to explain his behaviour. And while there’s a sense of technical perfectionism to the way Norton contorts his body to imitate Lionel’s tics, he doesn’t treat the character as an acting exercise – there’s as much emphasis on his role as the film’s romantic, idealistic hero.
Swaddled in a newsboy cap and pea coat, Lionel certainly looks at home in the coolly lit cityscapes of cinematographer Dick Pope. Daniel Pemberton’s score, too, is lush and authentic (with a surprise contribution from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke).
But while Motherless Brooklyn may look and sound convincing, its characters too easily slip too into stiff and unconvincing archetypes. A community activist (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) ends up the damsel-in-distress. Moses Randolph, Norton’s nod to real-life public official and notorious bigot Robert Moses, is far too on the nose when played by Alec Baldwin. With a peacock’s ego and a tendency to use phrases like, “The doers who make this country great”, he’s just another variation of the actor’s now-famous Trump impersonation. There might have been an opportunity to tether Motherless Brooklyn’s themes to today’s concerns, but it’s hard to see the truth through all the stylistic haze.