JUDY WOODRUFF: A film that premiered at the Toronto International Film festival earlier
this fall is now set to open nationwide.
And, as Jeffrey Brown reports, it takes on a harrowing subject affecting families in
every corner of the United States.
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET, Actor: When I tried it, I felt better than I ever had, so I just kept
on doing it.
JEFFREY BROWN: In the film "Beautiful Boy," a young man enters the hell of drug addiction.
A father struggles to understand what's happened to his little boy.
And the two go through cycles of recovery and relapse, a seemingly never-ending world
of heartbreak.
It's a tough subject, also one very much in the psyche of a nation in the throes of an
opioid addiction crisis.
STEVE CARELL, Actor: It's the reason I chose the movie.
JEFFREY BROWN: It is?
STEVE CARELL: Yes.
I felt that it was about the most timely thing you could choose to make a film about.
JEFFREY BROWN: Steve Carell plays the father David Sheff, a Northern California freelance
journalist whose life comes crashing down.
STEVE CARELL: My son has gone missing.
And I wanted to check to see if he had maybe been brought in or -- or if there had been
an accident.
I have a 14- and a 17-year-old.
And every night, I go home, and I would look at them and I would hug them.
And it's -- you know, it sounds like a cliche, but you can't help but have stuff like this
get inside as you're doing it.
JEFFREY BROWN: Timothee Chalamet plays young Nic Sheff, living a secret life that spins
out of control, in his case from addiction to methamphetamines.
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: Dad, I'm really sorry about everything.
Today, we live in a really confusing world.
And this is an out in many ways.
This is a crisis in our country right now.
It's a crisis with people of all ages and genders and race.
STEVE CARELL: This is a story about a family and about a deep love and connection between
this father and son specifically.
And that's how I approached it.
I didn't -- I didn't approach it as an addiction drama or a recovery trauma.
I thought of it as a compelling story.
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: I have worked on projects that are fiction, and it feels like there's
a responsibility to the author.
And here, I thought, like, there was an added layer of intensity in that regard, because
these are real people who lived these lives and had this experience.
JEFFREY BROWN: The film is based on a true account, two accounts, in fact.
The real-life David and Nic Sheff each published a memoir of his experience, offering director
Felix Van Groeningen a kind of duet of voices, sometimes in synch, other times sailing past
one another.
FELIX VAN GROENINGEN, Director, "Beautiful Boy": The things they talked about where the
same, but written in a different way and seen from a different point of view.
So, I'm balancing those two points of view and understanding the two of them, even as
it leads to almost a tragic breakup, I thought was really powerful.
JEFFREY BROWN: Steve Carell is known as a brilliant and versatile comedian, perhaps
still most of all for his role in the TV series "The Office."
STEVE CARELL: That's what she said.
(LAUGHTER)
JEFFREY BROWN: But he's now taken on a number of dramatic roles, including the 2014 "Foxcatcher."
STEVE CARELL: What do you hope to achieve, Mark?
CHANNING TATUM, Actor: I want to be the best in the world.
STEVE CARELL: Good.
JEFFREY BROWN: Timothee Chalamet, already a veteran actor at just 22, burst into larger
public awareness with last year's "Call Me By Your Name."
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: Just watch.
This is how he will say goodbye to us when the time comes.
Later.
STEVE CARELL: I have been doing some research.
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: Been doing some (EXPLETIVE DELETED) research.
You got to be kidding me, dad.
STEVE CARELL: You think that you have this under control.
And I understand how scared you are.
JEFFREY BROWN: In "Beautiful Boy," the two are comfortably together and horribly apart,
sometimes, as in this scene, at the same time.
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: Like your special creation or something, and you don't like who I am
now.
STEVE CARELL: Both keep trying in their own way to reach the other, but it's almost like
one of them is underwater, and one of them's on a boat, and they're trying to talk to each
other.
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: By nature of playing the symptoms of meth addiction, there's a spontaneity
to that.
And Steve is a major improv legend.
And I bring that up because I could see immediately.
JEFFREY BROWN: Does your improv experience come into play in a scene like that?
STEVE CARELL: Not so much in the context of improvising dialogue, but it was more the
physicality of improv, the trying to suss out where the other -- the other character
is within the scene.
I don't know.
It's -- God, I have such a hard time talking about acting.
JEFFREY BROWN: You do?
STEVE CARELL: I do.
I really do.
JEFFREY BROWN: Because?
STEVE CARELL: I always sound so incredibly pretentious talking about...
JEFFREY BROWN: And you don't like it?
STEVE CARELL: You talk about craft.
Sometimes, it works, and, sometimes, it doesn't.
And I think so much of it is just who your partner is, who you're working with.
JEFFREY BROWN: No one's surprised to see you doing these serious films anymore, I don't
think.
Are you -- are you?
Is this what you wanted to do?
STEVE CARELL: To be pretentious, yes.
That was my ultimate goal.
(LAUGHTER)
JEFFREY BROWN: To have people like me asking, like, about this serious film?
STEVE CARELL: Exactly.
Yes.
I have finally made it to PBS.
That's -- that was it.
JEFFREY BROWN: Congratulations.
STEVE CARELL: Thank you.
There's no sort of specific career trajectory that I was looking for.
JEFFREY BROWN: Do you have one?
I mean, because you're just starting out.
People are getting to know you, and know you big time now, suddenly,
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: No, I -- there's no road map.
I feel that I just want to work on a good things and keep working with good people and
people I can learn from.
And it's a new world in many ways.
I think it's a beautiful thing for creatives, period.
There is a great, raw, new energy.
JEFFREY BROWN: "Beautiful Boy" opens nationwide this week.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at the Toronto International Film Festival.