A good movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it was starring Shia LaBeouf, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, pretty much like everything else LaBeouf has done recently, the damned thing was pretty meta. At least, you have to admit that it took some guts to write such a bleak account of his youth and, on top of that, to play his father who must have had a huge impact on him. On the other hand, even if LaBeouf is an interesting actor, he is also pretty controversial and this movie will certainly not debunk his terribly narcissistic reputation. Still, the damned thing gave a really bleak and deglamorizing look on the life of children stars. In fact, it’s not really uncommon that, when a child is getting a steady gig in the entertainment business, his parents actually stop working to ‘support’ him (for example, when Ryan Gosling was just a kid and worked on ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’, he lived with his family in a nearby trailer park and he was the family's only source of income). However, what happened to Otis (and to some extent, probably, to Shia LaBeouf himself) was pretty much the stuff of nightmare though. It’s too bad that, even though Lucas Hedges was fine here, he didn’t look anything like Noah Jupe or Shia LaBeouf. It’s strange since Jupe, who also delivered a strong performance, was a perfect choice to play a younger version of Shia LaBeouf. On the other hand, to have a younger version of Shia LaBeouf, an older version of Shia LaBeouf and Shia LaBeouf himself was maybe too much though. Another issue I had was with FKA Twigs. I mean, it’s not that she was really bad, it was more the fact that her character was rather useless. Furthermore, it was rather cringe-inducing to see in her in such a personal movie for LaBeouf and to know that they would start afterwards a relationship during which he would be terribly abusive with her (which is not hard to believe after you see this movie). Anyway, to conclude, it turned out to be another dark and intriguing movie from LaBeouf and I think it is definitely worth a look.