REVIEW: Honey Boy offers an intimate and harrowing look at the dark side of fame as a child star.


Writer and actor Shia LaBeouf channels his youth as a child star and the contentious relationship he had with his father into a raw and affecting script and performance in this beautifully directed film from Alma Har’el.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1990s, there was an afternoon I remember to this day clear as if it had happened yesterday. My friends and I went to a mini-golf/arcade to play the new Super Street Fighter 2 and Samurai Shodown arcade cabinets. We had a lot of fun playing and there was a birthday party going on at the venue that had a special celebrity guest from a popular 90’s sitcom. The star of the show was and is to this day known more for the name of the character he played on this show than anything he has done since. We played a few games and I beat him handily. After a few, kids were giving him quarters just so he could beat me and his playstyle got very aggressive after being beaten handily in character after a few games. Once a couple more games went by, he left and went off to play some more games with the kids whose parents had contracted him to show at this party. Not more than a few minutes after that, the child star’s father came up to us and got into an off-color conversation with us about women, Hillary Clinton, and censorship. I left that day thinking that being a child star must be really awful; having to rent yourself out to make ends meet and that this kid’s dad was basically tricking him out. It resonated with me that his life must not be a happy one even if he was known all over and famous.

That’s the same vibe I got from watching Shia LaBeouf and Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy, based on LaBeouf’s youth spent growing up as a child actor on Disney’s Even Stevens and having to live with his father when he filmed the show. LaBeouf’s script casts him in the role of his father, here named James, while the younger Shia is recast as Otis; played as a boy by Noah Jupe and an adult by Lucas Hedges. Some might argue that this is something of a stunt casting trick; that it gives LeBeouf an open environment to air his grievances against the film’s straw man of his father. But LeBeouf goes for a surprisingly evenhanded portrayal, drawing on his own life story and showing the multiple facets of his father, from failed rodeo clown jealous of his son’s success and resentful of being on the payroll of a child, to someone who cares about his son and worries he is losing him, bit by bit, to the industry and outside influences like a well-to-do big brother. Hedges channels a similar spirit in playing the older version of Otis, someone who is hiding the part of himself scarred by his youth and looking for anything to mask it. But it is Jupe who has a very showy and beautifully acted portrayal of Otis as a young man who shines and keeps the film one that is relatable and poignant. His relationship with a truck stop prostitute played by FKA Twigs is one of the film’s brightest spots and the screen shines whenever Jupe is there. His interactions with LeBeouf make the film work as well as it does. The film is strikingly original; there are shades of films like Buffalo ’66 in here but the fact that this is LeBeouf’s own story along with Harel’s own stylish direction makes the work their own.

Overall, Honey Boy is one of the year’s best films, with LeBeouf and Jupe bringing their A-game and really make the film competitive against pieces like Joker and Uncut Gems. Make the trip to see it or catch it on Prime, because it is daring, haunting and unique in all the best ways.