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“When I tried it, I felt better than I ever had. So I just kept on doing it,” candidly declared actor Timothee Chalamet portraying teenager Nicolas Sheff, in Sheff’s biographical drama “Beautiful Boy.”
The 2018 film is both heartbreaking and unapologetically necessary in documenting the often unchronicled, anguishing journey that substance abuse inflicts on its victims.
The actor’s declaration of euphoria with drug use parallels the same feeling San Franciscan memoir journalist Nic Sheff experienced during his decade-long battle with alcohol, marijuana, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, ecstasy, cocaine, methamphetamines, and heroin addiction, from childhood to early adulthood.
“When I did that line of crystal meth, I thought—I’ve found it, the feeling I’ve been missing my whole life. I felt powerful and beautiful and confident,” said Nic, in the US News interview, “The Sheff Family Struggles With Addiction,” in which reporters spoke with Nic and his father, David Sheff, about his experience with substance abuse.
“Beautiful Boy” director Felix Van Groeningen does an exceptional job of portraying the detrimental relationship between substance abuse and its vulnerable victims through his depiction of Nic’s complete childhood story.
Nic was born on July 20, 1987, in San Francisco. His parents, David and Vicki Sheff, divorced when Nic was 3 years old. Nic’s father, David Sheff, is a journalist and magazine writer who soon remarries, has two young children, and resides in Inverness, California, with his second wife.
Amid these distinct periods of Nic’s life also exists his introduction to and gradual relationship with numerous addictive substances. The first substance that Nic uses is alcohol, and his relationship with alcohol begins at age 11. According to his memoir, “Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines,” written in 2008, and his father’s memoir “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction”, also published in the same year, Nic first consumes vodka from a liquor cabinet on a family trip in Lake Tahoe. Then, at age 12, Nic begins smoking marijuana regularly, and particularly recalls frequently “sneaking off into the bushes during recess” to smoke.
Between this time and 18, Nic experiments with acid (LSD), psilocybin mushrooms, ecstasy, and cocaine. By age 18, he developed addictions to both crystal methamphetamine and heroin. In the midst of his substance abuse, Nic is still consistently considered an intelligent, gifted, and valued kid, with his father writing, “He is brilliant and wonderful and charismatic and loving when he’s not using, but like every addict I have ever heard of, he becomes a stranger when he is, distant and foolish and self-destructive and broken and dangerous.”
Nic achieved sobriety for a short time period, and around 2005, enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley. However, he relapsed during his first semester, dropped out of school, and returned home, where he continued using methamphetamines.
For the following years, until his mid-20s, Nic is enrolled in numerous rehabilitation programs, experiences multiple relapses, writes his first memoir, “Tweak,” in 2008, and after relapsing once again, overdoses on methamphetamines in the same year.
Eventually, in 2009, Nic experienced a harrowing, near-fatal heroin overdose that ultimately led to a significant period of deep self-reflection and rehabilitation. Over the next year, he went through various rehabilitation and treatment centers, therapy and group counseling programs, and developed healthy coping strategies, which eventually led him to maintain steady sobriety in 2010 and the countless years to follow.
During the 2009 CNN interview titled “Addiction: Life on the Edge,” interviewer Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked Nic, “How did you break the cycle?, and Nic responded, “I was at this last treatment center. For the first time they really forced me, in a way, to sit still and face myself and look inward. I was able to see that the person that is in my core is not this worthless, disgusting person, but is a person that is of value.”
Van Groeningen’s compelling depiction of Nic’s journey with substance abuse is undeniably crucial in conveying the tale of the vulnerable young person and the addictive substance. However, it’s not just a tale, or a traumatic retelling of a distant and isolated reality. Nic’s story of substance abuse reflects a struggle prominent within the lives of thousands of young people across the country.
According to the study, “Listening to youth: Adolescents’ reasons for substance use as a unique predictor of treatment response and outcome” by the National Library of Medicine, adolescents’ abuse of drugs and alcohol is recognized as a leading health problem in the United States, and Nic’s experience with addiction throughout his adolescence can serve as a direct representation of this epidemic.
Nic’s abuse of alcohol in middle school is representative of the 196,000 Californian adolescents aged between 12 and 17 who engaged in alcohol use and the 126,000 adolescents of the same age who engaged in binge drinking within the month of February of this year.
His usage of marijuana could be considered similar to or even representative of the 5.5% of youth aged between 13 and 17 who self-reported cannabis use, and the 0.3% who reported PCU (Problematic Cannabis Use) in the 2021 study conducted by researchers at Kaiser Permanente.
His early experimentation with LSD and psilocybin mushrooms can be further understood by the 2023 study titled “Hopelessness, Suicidality, and Co-Occurring Substance Use among Adolescent Hallucinogen Users” by the National Library of Medicine, in which 8.4% of adolescents between 13 and 17 reported a lifetime usage of hallucinogens.
Nic’s concurrent abuse of ecstasy and cocaine after his marijuana usage reflects the National Library of Medicine’s study “Pathways between Ecstasy Initiation and Other Drug Use,” in which researchers found that 83% of youth who engaged with ecstasy had already begun using marijuana prior.
Finally, Nic’s near-fatal heroin overdose in 2009 can serve as a reflection of the overwhelming prevalence of opioid overdoses in the U.S. preceding 2009, and those occurring in later periods. The epidemic period immediately before his overdose, which is titled “Wave 1”, emerged in the early 1990s, peaked in 1999, and progressed into the early 2000s. Overdoses during this period were primarily from prescription opioids, such as semi-synthetic or natural opioids.
In “Wave 2”, which is classified as the second wave of the opioid epidemic and immediately followed Nic’s heroin overdose in 2009, overdoses were emphasized by the overwhelming presence of heroin-related deaths. According to a study by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, approximately 3,278 people died from heroin-related overdoses in 2009, and in 2010, this number slightly decreased to around 3,036 heroin-related overdose fatalities.
While overdose deaths caused by heroin abuse have been on rapid decline recently due to the dramatic increase in fatalities involving synthetic opioids like fentanyl, understanding the history of the opioid epidemic, and particularly the fatal impact of specific opioid usage, can help citizens better comprehend the significance of the current and future “epidemic waves” and why it is foremost crucial to prevent them.
Understanding the research behind Nic Sheff’s substance abuse and the overall prevalence of substance abuse among youth in the United States makes the difference between an audience’s mindless and conscious consumption of media. It allows those to utilize the same implicit privilege that they have to witness the plight of an individual through a television screen, to simultaneously enact impactful change within communities that directly and continuously experience such trauma.
Biographical movies like “Beautiful Boy” often evoke immense feelings of empathy and compassion within an audience. While emotions like these are especially crucial in the social humanization of those most vulnerable to this widely stigmatized issue, they have the potential to be the means for so much more.
Effective change doesn’t occur when we simply sit around and feel; rather, it occurs when we utilize this “feel” as an instrument for unapologetic and intentional acts of justice.
This article was written as part of a program to educate youth and others about Alameda County’s opioid crisis, prevention and treatment options. The program is funded by the Alameda County Behavioral Health Department and the grant is administered by Three Valleys Community Foundation.
Nighttime lane closures on I-580 near Pleasanton, I-680 through San Ramon ValleyMarch 25, 2026 2:05 pm