Available on DVD: “Beautiful Boy”

Michael Sheen and Maria Bello in Beautiful Boy

"We decided to use a campus shooting and yet write nothing about it."

So writes Shawn Ku, the director and co-author of the grim-times-10 Beautiful Boy. Premiering at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Ku’s debut feature provides a fierce acting opportunity for co-stars Maria Bello, the least affected first-rate actress on the planet, and Michael Sheen, equally strong, best known as a light-comic technician, and as David Frost in Frost/Nixon. They portray middle-class suburban L.A. parents lurching uncertainly toward divorce, whose college freshman son (Kyle Gallner, seen and heard only in fragments) turns his inchoate despair on his fellow students and then himself, in a massacre inspired by the 2007 Virginia Tech killings.

This happens early. Ku and writing partner Michael Armbruster were right to focus on the aftermath, not cheap suspense tactics or easy answers to the question: What fed this tragedy? Parsing the film’s visual strategy, we do get plenty of hints, some of them a little dubious.

Proofreader Kate and businessman Bill are empty-nesters living in a soulless, flatly lighted McMansion. Cinematographer Michael Fimognari deglamorizes the Southern California sunshine to such a degree, the characters begin the film nearly suffocating from a kind of emotional pollution. The love has left this marriage. Brackish light and empty space isolate these people even when they’re together.

Coping with the news of their late son’s murderous actions, the couple moves in with Kate’s brother (Alan Tudyk), sister-in-law (Moon Bloodgood) and their indulged preteen son (Cody Wai-Ho Lee), who brings out a desperate mothering instinct in Kate. In this warm-toned environment everything warms up; these people live in a lovely Craftsman-style bungalow, where love is possible.

Like the recent Blue Valentine, Beautiful Boy culminates in a motel-room catharsis, as Bill and Kate — by this point beset by media jackals, derided as the worst parents alive — confront each other in a messy combination of recriminations, accusations, rage and grief. (And sex.) Bello and Sheen rise to the somewhat schematic occasion with an emotional rawness that can be truly startling. Bello is especially fine, and almost arresting enough to take your mind off the film’s weirder implications. Is Ku really drawing a line, however crooked, between parents in separate bedrooms and blood all over a classroom wall? And if we’re left with a ray of hope regarding Kate and Bill’s future together, is Ku suggesting that, well, at least the massacre brought these two back together again?

In actuality the film is more nuanced than that. But if the key performances in Beautiful Boy were any less honest, the film’s half-formed suppositions would undo it utterly.