YMMV / Honey Boy

• Award Snub: Being a micro-budget, under-the-radar critical indie darling, it was completely overlooked throughout the 2019 award season.
• Awesome Music: The titular track "Honey Boy" may be short, but its use in trailers and in the very first flashback scene give each a feeling of childlike innocence. The film being marketed as an autobiography by Shia LaBeouf doubles the intimacy.
• Funny Moments: After finally reaching an understanding, James tells Otis that he's "growing". Otis takes this as him "growing" as a person, when he actually meant that he's literally growing marijuana on the side of the highway.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • FKA twigs' role in what was promoted as an autobiography of Shia LaBeouf's life (and a rationalization of the troubled man he became through the abused boy he was) can feel soured in light of Twigs suing him a year after the film's release, alleging sexual battery, assault, and infliction of emotional distress.
  • 2022 dealt another serious blow to the film's purported objective to empathetically portray LaBeouf as a product of his father. On Jon Bernthal's Real Ones podcast, LaBeouf stated that he took extensive creative liberties in the film's characterization of his father to the point of fabrication, creating an image of his father as abusive that reportedly had next-to-no basis in reality and was meant more to portray himself as a "wounded, fractured child that you could root for". LaBeouf described who his father really is as "fractured", "crooked", and "wonky" but always loving, and only physical with him on one occasion. Furthermore, he stated that he withheld these details in the script he sent his father to get his permission to make the film. While he also stated that he took full accountability for this and admitted that he could never undo the effects the film has had on the public's perception of his father, these revelations have made many who enjoyed and connected with the film reconsider their stance on it.
    • Around the time of the film, LaBeouf made a statement about feeling "very selfish" setting the film in motion, as he felt he was fetishizing his pain, and elsewhere admitted (sometimes in jest, sometimes seriously) to lying to his father to get him to sign off on the film by telling him that Mel Gibson would be playing him. These revelations have sadly put both aspects of the film's production in a deeper context.
• He Really Can Act: Shia LaBeouf was already known as a prominent actor by the time the film was made, but after years of legal troubles, eccentric public behavior, and other infamous incidents such as the "HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US" art movement, most people were left skeptical. His performance in this film brought many back onto his side.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The film is an adult drama despite its name and standard poster (a grumpy pre-teen boy who has had a large pie smashed in his face) making it look like a harmless kid-friendly slapstick.

---