Questionable filmmaking undercuts powerful performances in Beautiful Boy, an at times heart wrenching and too often perplexing delve into the vicious cycle of drug addiction.

Drug use in film is presented and portrayed in many ways. From Trainspotting to The Panic in Needle Park to Requiem for a Dream, that vicious cycle that sucks users in to a living hell is given all kinds of depictions. Beautiful Boy, to its credit, tries to find another way to tell a story told many times before. While it achieves in doing so, there are also moments where the film is undercut by questionable filmmaking, resulting in a film that doesn’t quite reach its potential.

Beautiful Boy is unique in that it is based on two separate memoirs chronicling the same events, written by David Sheff and his son Nic Sceff. The story is deceptively simple: Nic (Timothee Chamalet) is a young man whose bright future is tarnished due to drug addiction. David (Steve Carrel) is Nic’s father, an acclaimed journalist who tries in vain to help Nic beat his addiction.

As all things are with drug addiction, nothing is black or white, on and off, and Beautiful Boy expertly presents ripple effects of this disease, with a keen focus on how a user is very much the eye of a tornado that destroys everything in its wake. Screenwriter Luke Davies (Lion) and director Felix Van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown) do a great job in showing how a loving father-son relationship is pushed to breaking point, and the casting of Steve Carell and Timothee Chalamet give that relationship life with heartbreaking, unflinching power. Carell is especially good as a father constantly searching for answers on how to save his son from drowning in the never-ending tide of drug addiction, only to find that he cannot.

Glaring problems are found in key scenes that should have delivered an emotional wallop, yet is instead muted in its impact thanks to curious soundtrack choices which robs from, rather than enhance certain scenes. It is one thing to try and differentiate Beautiful Boy from the deluge of other drug addiction movies. It’s another to do so at the expense of a powerful dramatic moment, that instead raises eyebrows instead of conjuring tears.

Those moments aside, Beautiful Boy effectively presents a struggle that has plagued many families, and will no doubt continue to do so. Its payoffs don’t necessarily register, but the moments beforehand are disarmingly good.