The troubled-teen genre is getting a workout this year, with films like “Beautiful Boy,” starring Timothée Chalamet as a teenage meth addict, and Joel Edgerton’s “Boy Erased,” starring Lucas Hedges as a teen whose parents won’t accept that he’s gay and push him into a conversion therapy program.
Hedges also appears with Julia Roberts in his father Peter Hedges’ “Ben Is Back,” a natural bookend to “Beautiful Boy” although it takes a very different approach to teen addiction.
While the latter covers a family struggling over a wide swath of time, “Ben Is Back” takes place over the course of a single night, Christmas Eve.