Movie Nation

I’ve seen and reviewed a lot of surf documentaries over the decades, but “And Two if By Sea: The Hobgood Brothers” stands out from the pack in two important regards.

One is the degree to which it dives into the lives of the surfing twins, C.J. and Damien Hobgood, surfers from Kelly Slater-land (Satellite Beach, Florida) who made names for themselves and made a living while not wholly escaping Slater’s multi-world-championship winning shadow.

We hear other surfers good-naturedly recall the identical twins “ganging up on” their competition in meets in their teens, see the ups and downs of their lives and careers, grapple with their ferocious competitiveness and see how flawed people can be.

One cheats on his wife and loses a marriage over it.

And we’ve never been told just how much “sponsorship” it takes to work your way into the good life. It takes $90,000 and up just to hit the meets on the World Surf Tour, travel, etc. Damn.

The other way “And Two if by Sea” stands out is the cutesiness filmmaker Justin Purser brings to the proceedings. He got comic Daniel Tosh to narrate it. Unless I’m missing a title in my surf filmography lifelist, that’s a first.

That narration is not quite omnipresent, but close — Tosh noting that “I believe that the medical term (for “identical twins”) is ‘the creepy kind,” pausing to identify the Florida Space Coast statue of Kelly Slater as “the only statue in the South NOT of an old racist.”

Funny enough, and certainly funnier than the way the movie opens — with a lot of folks venturing an opinion as to “what a Hobgood is.”

That sets the tone for the picture, which features cute captions (“Speaks Fluent Australian”) in identifying interview subjects, the half-joking presence of a medical expert on identical twins (“There’s a lot of power in twinship!”) and a little self-aware perspective that the Hobgoods didn’t team up to cure cancer or put a woman on Mars. They were just looking for that wave that would “land them in the history book, the SURF history book.”

The cutesiness doesn’t kill the film, and a little perspective is welcome in a genre that has given us decades of glorious slo-mo of gorgeous Aussie, Hawaiian and California (and Florida) girls and boys on gorgeous, thunderous slo-motion waves. But I won’t lie, it’s grating, like an endless series of generally limp rim-shots redundantly whacked on every joke in an indifferently-funny comic’s routine.

“That ISN’T what the Cialis commercials portray. Wait, is this a LIFETIME movie?”

The surfing footage is good, nothing that would make the picture stand out in a crowded genre. But the legion of interviews, with the Hobgoods, their parents, sibling and spouses taking part, get across a few new ways of considering surfing.

It starts with competitors noting what “competitive a–h—s” the two were to everybody else, and the Hobgoods confessing what we’re never told about this world and its laid-back, “chillaxed” subculture. “It’s a very selfish sport,” with head games played out in the water waiting for a wave, stare-downs and fierce paddling to beat the other surfer (even in non-competitive settings) onto a wave, behavior that flirts with bullying.

We see the brothers yelling at each other in the water, gesturing and shouting at the judges for giving them a poor score, even as these Christian competitors never let things turn profane or ugly.

The ebb and flow of their disparate careers is only mildly interesting, as is the conflict. Because, as we’ve been assured, with a twin “you’ve got a friend for life,” so none of this Everly Brothers antipathy, here.

Still, there’s enough new information and candor to make “And Two if By Sea” worth a look if surf docs are your thing. Just brace yourself for the cutesie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, one graphic injury scene, some profanity

Cast: C.J. Hobgood, Damien Hobgood, Kelly Slater, Carissa Moore, Sal Masakela, Charlotte Hobgood, Rachel Hobgood, narrated by Daniel Tosh.

Credits: Directed by Justin Purser, script by Justin Purser, Daniel Tosh, Christopher Gessner and Carly Hallam. A 1091 Media release.

Running time: 1:43

In total agreement with the various pieces around the web about this Golden Globes snub.

Natalie Portman pointed it out in reading off the “all male nominees” list o the telecast this morning.

Three or four women directors were worth considering for their hit movies this year, one of whom should have warranted a nomination.

The only way Marielle Heller, of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and last year’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is going to become as familiar a name as Jordan Peele, James Mangold or self-promoter Ava DuVernay is for a nomination to show up when she does one of the best directing jobs of the year.

For my money, Heller did a better job than Scorsese or Baumbach, even if this year’s field of would-be contenders is overrun — Boon Jong Ho, Heller, Mangold, Todd Haynes, Todd Philips, Sam Mendes, Tarantino, Alma Har’el, Lorene Scafaria and Lulu Wang did impressive jobs, and Scorsese and Baumbach have both been much better in earlier projects.

Our “Neighbor” should be in the Oscar mix, no matter what the Globes people think.

The problem with any award given out by a group of voters is figuring out who to get behind. I dare say three or four women behind the camera got some Globes nomination votes. “Neighborhood” and “Honey Boy” were the best films directed by women in 2019. Kasi Lemons is the most experienced female director of an awards contender (“Harriet”).

“Booksmart” didn’t gain much traction with the audience, but Olivia Wilde had a lot of buzz before it faded.

The best directing job by a woman was Scafaria with “Hustle.” A dozen of good directing jobs are ignored every year. This year, several of them are sure to be by women. Will one of them break through?

In November of 1957, the biggest gathering of mob bosses in Mafia history took place in tiny Apalachin, New York. Every Big Name in La Cosa Nostra showed up in upstate New York — some 60 mob bosses from across the country, 100 mobsters in total.

It was so theatrical, so celebrated, such a legendary affair that many a mob movie — “The Valachi Papers” covered the real thing, “The Godfather” fictionalized a version, even “Analyze This” went there  — felt the need to depict it.

Sure, it was raided by the cops and the Feds. But did you ever think about the catering? I mean, who fed them? Where’d they get all that meat, wine and pasta in the middle-of-nowhere, New York?

That’s the most promising premise wrapped up in “Mob Town,” a historically and dramatically sloppy version of the“Apalachin Conference” made on a shoestring and starring David Arquette.

Building the film around the doggedly suspicious real-life state trooper, Sgt. Ed Croswell, is earnest and well-intentioned. But Croswell (Arquette) noticing that “all the meat in town has disappeared,” bickering with his boss over “The taxpayers are paying you to pull in SPEEDING tickets!” when “I KNOW something big is going to go down, here” and treating it as a mystery he is solving might not have been the right way to go.

Because it’s the laughs that work here, the comic possibilities that beg to be explored. The actor-turned director behind the camera, Danny A. Abeckaser, seemed to get this. He directed and gave himself the role of Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara,the host for this “barbecue.” And his scenes, bickering with the fish market guy who keeps vetoing the fish he wants to serve (while sipping from a flash, because we all need a prop in our “big scene), bribing and cursing the meat wholesaler, show us the movie that might have been. He’s funny and they’re funny.

“The devil is in the details,” the old expression goes. “Men stumble on stones, not mountains,” Big Boss Vito Genovese (Robert Davi) growls. So if you don’t have the money to rent an estate that looks big enough to pass for the rambling, two-wing stone structure that Barbara, a Canada Dry wholesaler whose real money came from being a “made man,” if you have to make this epic mid-November meeting “a barbecue,” if you can’t hire polished actors who pop off the screen for the supporting roles, if most of your budget seems set aside to rent vintage Caddies, Chevys, trucks and coupes, then maybe you go the “Analyze This” route.

Comedy is always cheaper. And we’re a lot more forgiving of butchering history when it’s all a laugh, a promenade of F-bombs and food featuring “every goombah in the country,” and not a dramatic thriller “based on true events.”

In 1957, Sgt. Croswell first realizes there’s something fishy in this sleepy town when he pulls over a guy with a new Chevy Bel Air, a fake ID and a wad of bills he wants the trooper to have “to speed things along.” A high-priced, insulting attorney with a writ from a state court judge ends that case. “Sergeant, park ranger, WHATEVER you are, go chase some squirrels!”

But Croswell’s attention turns to this Barbara guy and his many pricey cars and “18 acre estate” (it was 53).

The script blurs the context, messing up the years Genovese was in exile in Italy (it was during WWII), but the mob wars of the day are slapped together — assassinations and botched assassinations abound.

Let’s settle this, peaceful like. Get everybody together, someplace out of the way.

As Barbara gets the word that he’s the Host on the Spot, the script meanders into the divorced Crowswell’s efforts to court the widowed mother of three (Jennifer Esposito), the clumsiness of his idiot fellow trooper (comic actor P.J. Byrne), the arguments with the patrol chief called “Lieutenant” in some scenes, “sergeant” on the phone and “Chief Lane” in the credits (James McCaffrey).

A ninety minute movie about a seminal event in Mob Wars history doesn’t need filler of this sort. And when you’ve got a capo working for Barbara who knows the price of failure will be “They ransack the house, and shoot us all, or maybe they shoot us and THEN ransack the house,” you know this is better suited for comedy.

Davi can be funny, as can Arquette. Some of the bit players, those sharing scenes with Abeckaser, are amusing. That capo is funny enough, although figuring that they’ll be slaughered with “a model Remington 870” (a Remington Model 870 shotgun) is funny for being a blown line, which neither he nor his director (who was in “Holy Rollers,” “The Iceman” and “The Irishman”) caught.

After showing a light touch in the opening pull-over scene, Arquette plays the rest of the movie straight as an arrow. Sometimes, there’s somebody funny making him the straight man in the scene, too often there isn’t.

It’s a pity they didn’t figure all this out before filming began. Because there’s no suspense to “Mob Town,” no feelings of imminent peril. The violence is all in the “mob wars” context scenes in the prologue.

And in spite of the history recited in the opening and closing titles, they didn’t have the money or the wherewithal to make this accurate enough to be dramatic.

Make it a comedy, make it about the catering, make it more an “Analyze This” sort of mob movie, then you’ve got something.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and some violence

Cast: David Arquette, Jennifer Esposito, Danny A. Abeckaser and Robert Davi.

Credits: Directed by Danny A. Abeckaser, script Jon Carlo, Joe Gilford. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:30

I will withhold my “What’s the point of THIS?” judgment because, well, this is a novel approach to take to a “reboot.”

A “Ghostbusters” without the comedy? A sequel assuming the originals are all, or mostly, in the Harold Ramis Wing of the Afterlife?

Rural and almost “It” serious?

Could work. Gave me a little chill, I have to say.

Next summer we learn if indeed “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” reinvents the wheel.

A peak Netflix moment? Or a predictor of the Oscars?

Big day for “The Irishman” and “Marriage Story,” some notice for “The Two Popes,” “Dolemite,” a near tidal wave.

“Ford v Ferrari” a token nomination, “Once Upon a Time.. in Hollywood,” “The Farewell,” “Parasite,” the usual suspects of this award season are represented.

JLo and Margot Robbie…

Phoenix and Bale and Hanks and Craig and Pitt and DiCaprio and DeNiro and Pacino and Pesci and Hopkins…

Awkwafina and Beanie Renee Z. and Blanchett…for “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” Seriously?

Cynthia Erivo tapped for “Harriet,” middling movie but a great performance.

“Us” and Lupita forgotten and shut out. “Dark Waters” and “Clemency” got no love.

At least the HFPA has overcome its Eastwood Icon Worship. A single Kathy Bates nomination for that one.

But best director’s a bit of a mess. They couldn’t rally support for one great directing job by a woman this year? Three impressive directing jobs by women, and no love?

There are a LOT of reasons to suspect that the Oscar nominations will NOT look like this list.

No argument against the “Marriage Story” acting nominations, but I am calling it. “The Irishman” has peaked. “Marriage Story” and it are over-rated, and dashing for the finish line before we can all take stock of that.

The “Jo Jo Rabbit” hype has faded, but just a bit.

NOBODY is claiming Awards Season glory on behalf of anything with Marvel in its lineage.

But “Joker” hasn’t peaked, so there may be some comic book movie love, come Oscar time. “1917” may not make a bigger splash than this, but “Ford v Ferrari’?” Come come now. “Dark Waters?” “Clemency?” Alfre? Mark?

The Academy has just enough time to step back, shrug off “Irishman” and “Bernadatte” and “Popes” and honor movies with more heft and relevance.

Best Picture-DRAMA

1917
The Irishman
Joker
Marriage Story
The Two Popes

Best Picture–COMEDY

Best Director

Bong Joon Ho, Parasite
Sam Mendes, 1917
Todd Phillips, Joker
Martin Scorsese, The Irishman
Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Best Screenplay

Noah Baumbach, Marriage Story
Bong Joon Ho & Jin Won Han, Parasite
Anthony McCarten, The Two Popes
Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Steven Zaillian, The Irishman

Best Foreign Language Film

The Farewell
Les Miserables
Pain and Glory
Parasite
Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Best Animated Film

Frozen 2
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
Missing Link
Toy Story 4
Lion King

Best Score

Alexandre Desplat, Little Women
Hildur Guðnadóttir, Joker
Randy Newman, Marriage Story
Thomas Newman, 1917
Daniel Pemberton, Motherless Brooklyn

Best Original Song

“Beautiful Ghosts” (Cats) — Taylor Swift & Andrew Lloyd Webber
“I’m Gonna Love Me Again” (Rocketman) — Elton John & Bernie Taupin
“Into the Unknown” (Frozen 2) — Robert Lopez & Kristen Anderson-Lopez
“Spirit” (The Lion King) — Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Timothy McKenzie & Ilya Salmanzadeh
“Stand Up” (Harriet) — Joshuah Brian Campbell & Cynthia Erivo

Best Supporting Actress

Kathy Bates, Richard Jewell
Annette Bening, The Report
Laura Dern, Marriage Story
Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers
Margot Robbie, Bombshell

Best Supporting Actor

Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Anthony Hopkins, The Two Popes
Al Pacino, The Irishman
Joe Pesci, The Irishman
Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

For the TV nominations, which are an entity unto themselves as they are so far removed from the TV Academy’s Emmy Awards, and reflect nothing so much as “What’s new on TV this year” most years, thanks to the voters in the Hollywood Foreign Press Asssociation, go to The Hollywood Reporter. 

The time setting is apt, the messaging of a strong woman “persisting” unmistakable.

An improvement on the original?

If “Rogue One” taught us nothing, aside from the sure knowledge that it’s not hard to find somebody better than J.J. Abrams to make a “Star Wars” movie, it’s that we should never under-estimate Felicity Jones’ ability to “sell” an action sequence.

In “The Aeronauts,” an old fashioned and grounded bit of historical balderdash, the Oscar-nominated Jones plays a Victorian Era lady daredevil with verve, grit and conviction. She makes us buy in, even as we’re thinking, “If ANY of this really happened, that’s a helluva story I’ve never heard a thing about.”

It’s the sort of adventure tale that Hollywood stopped making 50 years ago, a beautifully-detailed period piece “inspired by true events” with a heaping helping of pure hokum.

Jones’ “Theory of Everything” co–star Eddie Redmayne plays pioneering meteorologist James Glaisher in 1860s Britain. Brittainia may “rule the waves,” but Glaisher is getting nowhere getting The Royal Society to accept his theory that if we learn enough about the atmosphere, we can start giving the people that “five day forecast” they’ve been craving.

He is stymied, unless he can convince some balloonist, “aeronaut” in the parlance of that pre-Wright Brothers day, to take him aloft.

His last, best chance happens to be a traveling balloon pilot with a sideshow barker’s appeal and showmanship to burn.

She’s also a woman. Amelia Rennes (pronounced “Wren”) is quite the bird, all pancake makeup and gaudy costume, making her entrance riding on the roof of a carriage, dazzling the paying customers for this “stunt” with a few cartwheels, her trusty traveling companion Jack Russell and not a lot of regard for this “weathersmith,” as one wag calls him.

They’re forced to get along for just this one long day, a record-attempt ascent, hoping to pass those meddlesome French and reach the highest altitude ever achieved in 1862.

The script wastes far too much time on the whole “You don’t take me seriously, so I shan’t take YOU seriously!” She’s “You should be taking in this beautiful world we’ve just left” and he’s “I’m a scientist. You’re the pilot. We should stick to our ROLES.”

The “Theory of Everything” stars click together. Remember, Redmayne won the best actor Oscar for that one, and Jones was nominated as best supporting actress.

Here, the roles are reversed, as flashbacks show us Rennes’ life trials and her disapproving sister (Phoebe Fox) disapproving, and Glaisher’s (Pronounced “glacier,” how cute is that?) skeptical parents (Tom Courtenay and Anne Reid) being skeptics.

Himesh Patel and Tim McInnerny turn up as James’ best friend and his biggest doubter at the Royal Society.

Director Tom Harper (“Wild Rose”) lets the Victorian melodrama in Jack Thorne’s script take over, which is worth an eyeroll or two. But Jones sets her jaw, narrows her eyes and battles the elements, the height, the primitive technology and the high altitude unknown like the action heroine she can be.

Pity her character in “Rogue One” had to die. But she lives on every time this seemingly delicate but always plucky Englishwoman takes on a daunting role and makes us believe that she’s the last woman on Earth you should underestimate when the chips are down and the balloon is up.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some peril and thematic elements

Cast: Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Phoebe Fox, Himesh Patel, Tom Courtenay and Tim McInnerny

Credits: Directed by Tom Harper, script by Jack Thorne. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:40

Disney bites off a little of that @vancityReynolds snark for this one, a violent action comedy about…well, you’ll see.

Yes, it’s a Fox movie. But Disney owns Fox, as the opening of this funny (ish) trailer reminds us. Next summer.

Let’s throw all those declarations that “Marriage Story,” Noah Baumbach’s dissection of a divorce, is unbearably “real” because of its “honesty.”

It’s not a docu-drama. It’s theatrical, melodramatic, over-the-top and no more representative of the end of a marriage than say a Woody Allen movie set in the same showbiz family milieu, “Hannah and Her Sisters.”

“Real” suggests a lot of people can vouch for it out of experience. The people here are unrepresentative in the extreme. So that’s not true. Perhaps my sister and brother critics should consider that.

No movie with a a bi-coastal bourgeois acting community couple, a “TV pilot” and “MacArthur (genius) Grant,” blood-spilled on a court-ordered “evaluator” visit to an apartment where one parent might get custody, where generations of one family have agents and the husband can remember dialogue and the lyrics from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” and feels the confidence and freedom to get up and belt “Being Alive” out when he hears the pianist in a New York bar tinkle out the first notes, is “real” is any sense for the vast majority of us.

And I’m not just speaking for “flyover America” when I say that. But you’re not going to hear anybody in Roanoke or Grand Forks or Orlando defend themselves to their lawyer with this sentence.

“I had never come alive myself. I was just feeding his aliveness!”

But it is touching at times, and it does find and broach some emotional truths. And Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, as Nicole and Charlie, are gloriously alive on the screen and can feel ripped from real life, even in their over-the-top moments.

It’s an indulgent dramedy, with hilariously venal lawyers (Laura Dern, Ray Liotta), $25,000 retainer fees and a sweeter, sensitive practitioner of “family law” who can’t help coming off as a doddering, wussy pushover (Alan Alda).

The script has a mediator who can’t mediate (Robert Smigel), scattered moments of “counseling” or “family law” speak, elaborate “theater people” Halloween costumes, on-set gossips and an acting family — Julie Haggerty plays Nicole’s dizzy actress-mom, Merrit Wever (“Nurse Jackie”) her sister — that stages and rehearses the moment sister Cassie “serves” Charlie his divorce papers.

And when Charlie arrives, he literally breaks down “the scene” to uncover its intent, how he’s supposed to react.

The uglier truth about divorce, divorced from the theatrics, is that it can be abrupt and emotional without lawyers, or drawn-out and emotional and expensive with lawyers.

I’d wager that there is rarely the sort of wall-punching post-filing shout-off depicted here. And the safe money is on this one last truth. There is no closure.

Baumbach frames this “Story” in lovely, sad scenes. We begin with the mediator trying to get each to remember everything they fell in love with about the other, and failing to convince the two to read what we’ve heard in voice-over narration out loud to each other.

“She’s a good citizen… She can drive a stick…She’s a mother who plays, really plays.”

“He cries easily in movies…He dresses well. He never looks embarrassing, very hard for a man.”

Yes, there are backhanded compliments mixed in. We know this isn’t going to change direction. Ever.

And the finale, no spoiler here, is heartbreaking as that “not reading aloud” declaration of virtues was never corrected.

This is the heightened reality of melodrama and comedy, where the distracted pitbull lawyer (Liotta) consulted because “she” has hired his female equivalent (Dern) thunders “If we start from a place that’s reasonable, and THEY start from a place of CRAZY, when we settle we’ll be somewhere between reasonable and CRAZY.”

Still, as with many failing marriages, the in-laws have fallen for the spouse being kicked out of the family.

“You have to STOP loving him, Mom. You can’t be friends with him any more.”

Mom can’t swear on “my dead gay husband” that she’ll do that. But hey, it’s a movie.

That, as you certainly have picked up by now, is my big gripe here. Whatever Baumbach, who has been through his own (public) divorce is working through in this script, the “truths” we can sink our teeth into and relate to are few and far between.

Yes, mediators “take sides.” Plenty of other movies and TV shows got to this first. Yes, there is a “loser” in even the “friendliest” divorces. Dern and Liotta score points breaking down — again (other movies, TV shows beat them to it) — California’s whiplash-inducing family law code biases.

The son Charlie and Nicole share (Azhy Robertson) becomes a tyrannical tyke, acting out — also choosing sides.

But the artifice of the world this is set in, the cash that even the supposedly “struggling” can bring to bear in this abstract showbiz world, was a turn-off to me.

I have a little experience of divorce, others and my own. For my money, HBO’s “Divorce” is funnier and more realistic and representative, if less emotional and operatic.

“Marriage Story” is almost funny enough and touching just often enough to endorse. It’s good, but it’s no “Scenes from a Marriage” or “Husbands and Wives” or hell, “Company,” for that matter. It’s just Netflixable.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and sexual references.

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Julie Haggerty, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, Merritt Wever, Robert Smigel and Wallace Shawn.

Credits: Written and directed by Noah Baumbach. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:17

Sometimes as a journalist you catch a glimpse of something when you’re talking to a child actor.

Maybe Macaulay Culkin is too interested in “performing,” distracting you as the interviewer. River Phoenix? Antic, manic, “wired” you decide later.

You hear the stories, the “stage parents,” the “growing up too fast” and worse. But some, like Amanda Bynes, are too put together to ever give a hint. Until later. Corey Feldman? He only gave away the game as an adult.

I remember chatting up the very young Natalie Portman and her contemporary, Mia Kirshner, and wondering just what kinds of parents thought it was a good idea to put these girls in sexually-charged roles in their early, early teens? Maybe they’ll tell us in their books, like Sally Field.

But Shia LaBeouf hid it better than most of them. He was earnest, lots of eye-contact, making the sale (talking about “Holes” and then “The Greatest Game Ever Played” and later “Disturbia”). His patter was hyped-up, breathless. And it only sputtered and deflected when you mentioned the p-word — “parents.” He had his work-arounds ready to recite, there. Not that he ever, for a second, came over as dishonest. Diplomatic or candid, always eager, wanting-to-be-liked to the point of being confrontational, eyes on the prize — a dazzling talent.

But the short sprint to stardom, anchoring franchise pictures, working working working — because when he wasn’t working, he was turning up in the tabloids, drunk or worse — gave everybody pause. Someday, you’d think, somebody’s going to put this young man on a couch.

LaBeouf decided to do that with a movie. “Honey Boy” is his searing, unsentimental statement on that life, that “career” and the guy who put him where he is today, the good and the bad of it. He scripted this semi-autobiographical drama about coming to terms with a traumatic childhood of grueling, dangerous work, the skills passed on and the awful parenting that got him where he is today.

And LaBeouf plays a version of his own father in it.

Three towering performances make “Honey Boy” one of the best pictures of the year. There’s LaBeouf, creating an “origin story” through the man who schooled him and pushed him, a wound-up fast-talking substance-abusing ex-con with anger issues, bitterness issues and an outlet for all that rage and disappointment — his kid.

Noah Jupe of “Wonder,” “A Quiet Place” and most recently “Ford v. Ferrari,” is Otis, a mop-topped spitting image of young Shia, smoking and swearing at 12, and already trying to declare his independence from a careless father who drills him and works him like the meal ticket he is.

As the adult Otis Lucas Hedges channels Shia, vocal mannerisms to physical tics (intense eye contact, followed by eyes cast down in fury), all mastered in a performance of hurry, panic and temper.

We meet Otis (Hedges) fully formed, already in a franchise (resembling “Transformers”), doing a yanked-back-by-an-explosion stunt over and over again, an unpleasant experience that his wince gives away he’s been suffering through for a decade.

Still, he has it all, right? It’s just that he’s alone, tormented, grasping at connections.

It all goes wrong for Otis, distracted and drunk behind the wheel. That, too, is a force of habit. And he’s sent to rehab because one judge has had enough of it. It is there, amid the “hug yourself” and “trust” and “primal scream” exercises that he faces his inquisitor, a therapist (Laura San Giacomo of “Pretty Woman”).

She’s not hearing his glib “I’m an egomaniac with an inferiority complex!” Classic Shia, by the way. Their sessions hunt for “exposures.” She flat out tells the rich punk movie star that she sees “clear signs of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder).”

And that’s how we meet the 12 year-old Otis, living in a fleabag motel across the courtyard from hookers, riding to and from the set on the back of father James’ (LaBeouf) motorcycle, jolted awake so that he won’t tumble off in traffic.

This is a bracing, maddening love-hate relationship, a man who breathlessly declares, “I’m your biggest CHEERLEADER, Honey Boy” in one moment, and belittles the kid in every other.

Otis wearily looks over the call-sheet to see when he needs to be on set and what scenes he’s shooting tomorrow. James just wants the envelope it came in because “they put the per diem in there.”

We get a glimpse of the set where Otis is put through the ringer, his distracted Dad rarely looking out for him, backstage in his Army Vet “POW-MIA” biker vest, John Lennon glasses and bandana, trying out his pick-up lines on a cute production assistant.

As adult Otis pieces these moments together in the fictive “present” (2005), younger Otis (1995) is trying to bond with a Big Brothers of America set up by his never-seen mom. Clifton Collins, Jr. plays this guy, all about baseball games and role-modeling, resented and “tested” by crazy-jerk James at every oopportunity.

But for all James’ bad traits and parenting lapses, all his tirades aimed at his estranged wife, we see him coaching the kid in comedy because “It’s ALL clowning.” He was a rodeo clown, once upon a time. He pushes his son to re-do a scene until he believes it, or “until you make me laugh.”

We see James in AA meetings, hear him remembering prison, and see Otis left alone, making friends with the young prostitute (FKA Twigs) in the motel, struggling to either break free from this dead weight in his life, or at least put the old man in his place.

“You’re my employee!”

Jupe lets us see the apple, sensitive, but straining to fall further from the tree, trapped by circumstances and family history, despite his growing success. LaBeouf pulls out all the stops, holds nothing back — love, jealousy, addiction and other weaknesses — as that tree.

And Hedges brings it all home, brilliantly encompassing all that these past experiences would produce; a talented, uninhibited and very polished performer who cannot keep it all together and bottled up the moment “that’s a wrap” is pronounced on a film set.

Whatever first-time feature director Alma Har’el brought to this, just keeping her eye on  the “effect” in light of all the “causes” is a signal contribution. Maybe she just, as the old saying goes, “stayed out of their way.” But the film’s grit and tone are unerring. And there’s a lot to be said of a filmmaker who knows how to let a great cast get down to business and tell a story that’s as raw as this.

Child actors occasionally tell their stories, after retirement. And the documentary “The Hollywood Complex” from a few years back captured some of the behind-the-scenes desperation of families gambling all on turning their children into stars and meal-tickets.

“Honey Boy” just tells us one story, with judgement and compassion, with an honesty that surprises and moves us. And it leaves it to us to decide if it was all worth it, if indeed the end justifies the means. You will never look at a child’s performance in a film or TV show the same way after this.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, some sexual material and drug use

Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe, FKA Twigs, Clifton Collins Jr., Martin Starr and Laura San Giacomo.

Credits: Directed by Alma Har’el, script by Shia LaBeouf.  An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:34