“Honey Boy” hurts. It hurts because the film is Shia LeBeouf’s cathartic self-reflection on his childhood, disguised as a father/son story gone horribly wrong. The first shot of this Honey Boy holds on 22-year old Otis Lort (Played by Lucas Hedges) as a massive explosion booms, sending Otis flying away from the camera and into the façade of a burning plane, screaming “NO, NO, NO, NO” at the top of his lungs. It’s extreme, but it’s also Hollywood. When the dust settles, we see cables attached to Otis, unscathed and resetting back to first position. This moment lays the groundwork for the rest of Honey Boy to unpack. It’s a film about the impact of theatrically produced trauma and acting as a means of managing lived pain.

The film follows three parallel narratives: one of Otis Lort at 22, the second, Otis at 12, and the third, Shia playing his father in the film. This structure allows the audience to watch 22-year-old Otis’ cathartic process, in which he finally acknowledges his childhood trauma and works through it by writing it down, and eventually acting it out (which is the film itself). The varying temporal structure of the film allows the audience to see a direct connection between the childhood cause of trauma and the adult effect it had on Otis. In many ways, the 22-year-old is still the 12-year-old.

With masterful awareness and attention to detail, the Israeli American director Alma Har’el manages to imbue a painful story with a dreamy, non-linear, neon catharsis. Honey Boy hurts because a good therapy session hurts. And that’s what this film is: a harsh reflection of Shia LeBeouf’s trauma as a child from his relationship with his father. 22-year-old Otis is a self-proclaimed “ego maniac with an inferiority complex,” who lands in court mandated rehab after multiple drunken arrests, violent altercations with the police, and a car accident—which we see play out in a montage in the first few minutes of the film. Throughout the film, he processes his PTSD through exposure therapy while in rehab. The film predominantly lingers in Otis’ childhood, as if we are trapped in 22-year-old Otis’ therapy homework: writing down scenes from his childhood. Otis’ time in rehab parallels Shia LeBeouf’s own experience in court mandated rehab, when he began writing the “Honey Boy” script in real life. These flashbacks, though, function less as a linear play-by play, and more as a harsh dream—a timeline that yanks Older Otis backwards as explosion debris, but he never manages to hit the ground and injure himself.

While 22-year-old Otis struggles with his emotional stability, 12-year-old Otis is surprisingly stable. Young Otis is a successful TV actor (who else grew up watching “Even Stevens”?) and lives in a motel alone with his father (James Lort), an ex-rodeo clown who constantly teeters between inappropriate emotional chaos and outright abuse. For young Otis, acting is his life, literally. He rehearses at night with his controlling father and he spends his days on set instead of at school. At one point, Otis notices his father watching the latest episode of his TV show, and he imagines hearing the voice of his on-screen Dad come out of his father’s mouth. He imagines James saying “I love you…I love you more than words can say. ” These are words we never hear James say to his son. For 12-year-old Otis, acting is a means of communicating his needs and managing his trauma.

We watch this theme play out repeatedly in both timelines of the film, but one other scene illustrates Otis’ connection between trauma and acting in a particularly brutal way. We watch a nuclear triangulation play out between James and Otis in their motel room with his mother (voiced by Natasha Lyonne) on the phone. James refuses to talk to his ex-wife on the phone, so Otis acts as the conduit of communication between his parents by literally acting out his parents screaming at each other with deeply disturbing accuracy. Here, Otis uses acting to inhabit his parents and survive the chaos of his dysfunctional family dynamic.

The connections between acting and trauma are explored in many ways throughout Honey Boy. With lines like “we all are [acting]. All the time,” and, “my whole job is motivated by trauma reminders,” LeBeouf and Har’el make it abundantly clear that for Otis, trauma and acting are inseparable. The challenge for the protagonist is less how to engage his trauma (which he does in his work) and more how to release it.

While young Otis’ life is a circular pattern of abuse (his father sporadically abuses him at home, acts inappropriately on set, and abuses him when he rehearses at home), older Otis inflicts trauma on himself through self-destructive behavior, and because of that, can no longer use the only distraction he was offered to manage his pain. He can’t act while in rehab. But this is where one of the most complex layers of trauma management comes into play. While younger and older Otis are constantly attempting to manage/escape their pain, we simultaneously watch LeBeouf take a leap forward in overcoming his trauma by utilizing acting as a tool for catharsis, instead of acting as a means of managing his trauma. LeBeouf plays his own abusive father.

LeBeouf’s intuitive performance is so convincing that you can’t help but wonder about the emotional toll it took to play James Lort. LeBeouf doesn’t shy away from the extreme: he’s racist, a felon, physically abusive, jealous of his 12-year-old son, barely sober, and he has a severe anger problem (not so coincidentally, like Otis at age of 22). While constantly terrified of being a bad father, he acts like a bad father in countless ways. But LeBeouf infuses his father with a real sense of pain, which becomes clear when James gives an AA share in front of a crowd of fellow vets. Har’el holds on a tight closeup of LeBeouf’s face and keeps most of the scene as a long take, allowing the audience to sink into the monologue. LeBeouf’s ability to infuse sympathy into a deeply troubled man’s expression of himself is profound and heartbreaking. Through LeBeouf’s acting, we are left with a better understanding of who James is, and in turn, who Shia’s perception of his father is. In this moment, the audience is left to linger in the power of acting as a means of expressing Shia’s compassion for his abusive father.

The ultimate moment of catharsis culminates in a dream. 22-year-old Otis has a conversation with his father (dressed in full clown costume) at the motel he grew up in. He shares a joint with James and tells him, “I’m writing a movie about you.” This moment of reflexive filmmaking amplifies the sense of release the film brings to Otis, and in turn, Shia. Otis reveals his film plan to James, and (if Shia’s life serves as an accurate gauge for the future) will play him in the film, and Shia is done inhabiting his father’s character in “Honey Boy”. All parties are released from the cords that dragged them backwards into the burning plane post-explosion, and the audience is left to consider, what comes after catharsis for Otis, and Shia?

HONEY BOY: A Painful Act of Catharsis