New movie Beautiful Boy tells story of writer’s bid to save his son from grip of drug addiction and his upset at risking his child’s life
IT was not the first time David Sheff had smoked a spliff – but he hoped it would be the only time he might be offered one by his teenage son.
He was desperately trying to get his eldest boy, Nic, to open up about his drug use, just as he had done about his own past experiences.
But the rock writer’s liberal tactic horribly backfired. Nic saw it as his dad endorsing drugs and, rather than being honest about what he was getting up to, went on to hide a devastating addiction to crystal meth.
David said the drug, one of the world’s deadliest, “stole Nic’s soul”.
His son’s dependence got so bad that he sold his body for sex to support his habit and went out to score immediately after recovering from a near fatal overdose.
Now, David and Nic’s separate accounts of the harrowing time have been made into the film Beautiful Boy, starring Steve Carell as David and Golden Globe-nominated Timothée Chalamet as Nic.
Out on Friday, it is an unflinching portrait of addiction, or as Steve puts it: “It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. Believe me, every night since we shot the film, I’ve come home and hugged my kids hard.”
Divorced David, 63, wrote his bestseller, Beautiful Boy, in the hope of helping other parents of addicts cope with the emotional agony.
Nic, 36, followed it with Tweak — a street term for meth — using it to warn about its risks. By writing down their darkest moments, both men came to better understand more of what the other had gone through.
Nic, who has been clean for eight years, admitted: “I always thought that if I killed myself by using drugs, it was my business and it wouldn’t affect him that much. In fact, it affected every aspect of his life. He was suffering constantly.
“Meanwhile, he thought I was having one endless party and now he saw that wasn’t the case at all. I was in a tremendous amount of pain.”
Growing up in the Sixties, David first tried cannabis — which scientists this week claimed may damage a youngster’s brain cells after just one joint — in high school.
He moved on to cocaine and LSD, and once tried crystal meth.
The drug, around which hit TV series Breaking Bad is based, is abused by 25million people worldwide and deaths are on the rise again in the US.
But back in his younger days, David recalled, “we thought drugs were safe. They weren’t.”
So as Nic was growing up, his dad, who wrote for rock mag Rolling Stone and later Playboy, often spoke to him about drugs, even quietly looking for common warning signs of teenage drug abuse.
Nic was only 12 when David discovered marijuana in his school backpack.
David, from San Francisco, spoke to his teacher, who told him that “most kids try it”, grounded Nic, told his friends’ parents their son was also taking drugs and called the mum of the alleged dealer.
Nic insisted it was a one-off, and for two years everything appeared normal — until he got caught buying cannabis in school.
Hoping to steer him down a different path to the one he feared his son was going down, David continued to talk about drugs.
He spoke of dabbling in his own youth and recounted a time as an adult when one of his addict friends died on the eve of their 40th birthday from taking meth, heroin and alcohol. But his lectures about the dangers of drugs would be met with his son rolling his eyes and saying: “You’re a great one to talk.”
David says: “Maybe I should have lied to Nic and kept my drug use hidden, but I didn’t.
“He knew the truth. I naively believed that if Nic was tempted to try them, he would tell me. I was wrong.” When Nic came to him offering a spliff, David says he knew his son was “already on this course, and I was desperate to connect with him”.
He adds he accepted the marijuana “without really thinking it through” but had a feeling Nic “was trying to open up to me, he was trying to talk”.
By the time his son was 17, Nic was taking ecstasy, LSD, magic mushrooms and then crystal meth.
David is in no doubt that it started with the cannabis, which he describes as “the gateway drug”, now legal in California.
Knowing what to do when faced with an addicted teenager was the toughest challenge.
A therapist recommended allowing Nic to keep drugs in the house, but David has two younger kids from his second marriage and did not like the idea.
Attempts at rehab were short-lived, with relapses never far away. Even being put on life support after an overdose in New York was not enough to make Nic quit.
After waking up he ripped the drips from his arm and went looking for the nearest dealer.
His need for more crystal meth got so bad that Nic, who by now had fled his dad’s home and was living on the streets, became a rent boy to pay his suppliers.
He recalled: “One day some guy offered me money when I was down living on the streets — not even for real sex at first.”
David would hear nothing from his son for months at a time and searched the streets for him. He could not sleep, wracked with guilt over whether his own actions had led to his son’s downfall.
He lived in fear of the phone call from the police to say he was dead.
In his book, David ponders whether his messy divorce, caused by his affair with the mum of one of Nic’s pals, set Nic on the road to addiction.
After the split, Nic lived with David during school term time then stayed with his mother in LA during the holidays.
David questions whether children can cope with these “parallel lives”.
But he also writes: “Whatever the cause — a genetic predisposition, the divorce, my drug history, my overprotectiveness, my failure to protect him, my leniency, my harshness, my immaturity, all of these — Nic’s addiction seemed to have a life of its own.”
Gradually he came to realise he could not do anything to get his son off meth.
He came to understand some advice put forward at a parents’ support group: “You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t cure it.”
Nic had to go through years of therapy before he realised he could live without drugs.
He admitted: “I felt sick and defective. I felt like there was something deeply wrong with me. I hated myself. I hated having to live with myself.”
After being estranged for 18 months, the two men started to talk again.
With Nic clean, they were able to start writing their books.
They hope that with being so open about their failings, the stigma of being an addict might be overcome.
David said: “We judge their bad choices.
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“We judge their families. We judge ourselves. We have stigmatised addiction.
“The judgment is so harsh that we hide, and when we hide we feel like we’re alone.
“We all like to think of it as something that happens to someone else, but it is hard to find a family that has not been touched by addiction.”
- Beautiful Boy is in cinemas from Friday.
- For more information on drugs, alcohol and mental health visit
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