Shia LaBeouf doesn’t come off looking so good in his critically approved festival hit Honey Boy. As James Lort, washed-up rodeo clown turned manager to his child actor son Otis (Noah Jupe), he cuts the paunchy figure of a balding, abusive alcoholic. But the screenwriter/star’s deconstruction of his own image doesn’t stop there; LaBeouf modeled Otis after himself, an avatar meant to illustrate how the demands of his kid-star career warped him as he grew into an entitled, self-destructive adult. In this work of semi-fictionalized memoir, the celebrity known to the public wrestles with both his memories of his father as well as himself, with a specificity bordering on the confessional. A young-adult Otis (played now by Lucas Hedges) re-enacts LaBeouf’s infamous run-in with the law captured via bodycam, howling everything short of “don’t you know who I am?!” in a fit of curdled Hollywood petulance.
There’s something thrilling about this moment and its tantalizing closeness to an explicit baring of the soul. LaBeouf states in no uncertain terms that he can see the little shit he used to be more clearly with the intervening years’ insight, an unsparing self-assessment of the sort encouraged during the rehab scenes in the second act. Earlier this year, I wrote about a regrettable preponderance of overly adulatory biopics produced in cooperation with their own subjects. But recent months have also proven that when the person in question does the work of writing their own warts-and-all story instead of merely approval-stamping someone else’s sanitized version, the results can be therapeutic in their bracingly unflattering honesty. On occasion ugly, often difficult, and utterly real, these quasi-autobiographies feel like high-wire storytelling without the safety net of metaphor or allegory – and with all the danger and immediacy of stakes the comparison implies.
When an auteur decides to draw on their own experiences for material, they enter into a pact with themselves and with the audience. For the artistic endeavor to succeed, they must be completely upfront about the flaws that relating this part of themselves will inevitably reveal. (If the creative party has chosen to share a chapter of their life that casts them in an unambiguously positive light, they’re already doomed.) Noah Baumbach’s new roman à clef drama Marriage Story seems to lob a couple of low blows in its early scenes, suggesting that Scarlett Johansson’s actor character attained popularity due solely to a gig in a raunchy teen classic that involved revealing her breasts. But what initially appears to be an incredibly petty swing at Baumbach’s ex Jennifer Jason Leigh and her star-making performance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High turns out to be a knowing reflection from Baumbach on his own pettiness. That disparagement isn’t the viewpoint of the film, which shows her to be a capable and self-possessed thespian, but rather the Baumbach stand-in played by Adam Driver.
While critics and viewers alike spend column inches and daydream-hours wondering about the particulars of authorial intent – did Beyoncé really write Lemonade about her husband’s infidelity, or was it just an act? – films like these make the underlying sentiments plain and simple. Joanna Hogg made no bones about putting her younger self up on screen for her well-received drama The Souvenir, a remembrance of first love and all the painful, foolish, counterintuitive behavior it inspires. Hogg focuses on a toxic love affair she shared with a narcissistic, drug-addled and yet deeply charming man, all the while refraining from portraying her double “Julie” (played ably by Honor Swinton-Byrne) as a victim of his seductions. She realizes that fault cuts both ways; he may have been a leech and a cad, but she was an immature girl with no sense of the world, and the time they shared together left her a more worldly, aware woman.
These films all share the general contour of Hogg’s inner journey, owning up to their own shortcomings as a path to self-improvement or at least self-knowledge. Jennifer Fox’s metafictional experiment The Tale and Pedro Almodóvar’s festival favorite Pain and Glory both feature a film-maker looking back on their formative experiences (in her instance, a sexual relationship with a predatory older couple; in his, decades of garbled desires and simmered resentments) to reckon with their inner demons and hopefully purge them. By the time Marriage Story runs the credits, Driver’s character has largely gotten over himself and learned to be his own man, a less intense take on the evolution undergone by LaBeouf’s grown-up Otis in counseling.
These films continue a proud tradition of cinematic navel-gazing dating back to Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz and its Federico Fellini-directed predecessor 8 1/2, their solipsistic perspective redeemed in self-deprecation. When an artist has the temerity to build a new work around themselves, they make the presumption that their experiences have been fascinating or dramatic or compelling enough to sustain a run time. In these cases, they’re obligated to prove it by showing themselves at their most vindictive, jealousor thoughtless. We’re never more human than when we’re at our worst.
Honey Boy is out in the US on 8 November and in the UK on 6 December. Marriage Story is out in cinemas on 8 November and on Netflix on 6 December
