Starring Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carrell as a father-son duo figuring out how to handle their relationship in the midst of his son's addiction, the movie is based on a memoir written by a real-life father, David Sheff. In the book Beautiful Boy, David writes about his son, Nic, who experiments with drugs (specifically meth) in his college years, until the experimentation becomes addiction. At the same time, Nic would sit down to write a memoir from his perspective, called Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines (Nic also wrote for the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why). Both of these accounts of these intense times were used to create Chalamet and Carrell's complex characters. (They also worked with the Sheffs .)