"Temple, Texas is very religious. A lot of churches and fast food restaurants. Football is really big in the city. And around 15, I was starting to realize that this type of environment didn’t feel good to me. By then I was into new wave music. There were cultural dividing lines: Metalheads had a thing, country western people had a thing, and the popular kids might have been more into pop-rock. But if you were into Art of Noise, New Order, the Cure, and Depeche Mode, it was a little weird. I had a lot of friends on the soccer team who thought I was queer. But there was a group of people in my high school who knew about these bands. We all dressed a little bit funny and we would catch hell for it. There were fights for sure. If you went to the mall or a party, there was always a chance that someone was going to want to fuck with you. I got in a fight in a classroom when a guy made fun of my Frankie Goes to Hollywood shirt. I took that very personally and knocked him on his ass. And I got sent to the principal for that, and I had to bend over his desk, and he swatted me. A lot of cowboys would call me and my friends “queer bitches.” So we adopted it and started calling each other that. It took some sting out of it. One time, this guy called my friend a “queer bitch,” and my friend licked his hand and wiped it on a cowboy’s truck and said, “Yeah, that’s right—and I got those AIDS.” The cowboy flipped out and drove off. Parade by Prince came out right when I was 15, and I was obsessed with him. I got that album the day it was released. The single “Kiss” had come out before, and the very first time I heard it I was like, “How could there be a better single than this?” It’s just undeniable. That song became what a single was to me—something stripped down, so you could focus on a few key elements that were just perfect. Prince was just the coolest, most creative thing happening. And he could fucking dance. I always thought the coolest job would be to make records, but for a long time I didn’t really think about how I would go about that. I just thought, “Something will happen.” And then I got wise and learned how to play an instrument. When I was 16, a girl I had a crush on left for college, and I borrowed a friend’s acoustic guitar and taught myself to play it as I was recovering/suffering from my first real breakup. I was pretty devastated. I would come home from school every day and just be in my room playing guitar and thinking about her, writing letters, listening to records."

"""In “Honey Boy,” Alma works deftly, without gimmick. From what I’ve seen, her work is always elegant, but here I think it may also be because of her confidence in the story, how she’s so deeply connected to it and to her subject, Shia, with whom she shares a common bond. LaBeouf’s script seems to want to hide nothing and to do so, it has to be very naturalistically compelling on its own. At first glance the story seems a familiar one, but this script and film effortlessly show the complex nuances of these relationships in a completely new light. Alma and Natasha Braier, her DP, move the camera emotionally, never drawing attention to style, only pulling you into the character. That said, the work is empirically beautiful. As layers are peeled back through their lens and these beautifully raw performances, Alma’s personal connection to the actors and the subject matter navigates the fine line of both sides of the relationship. It would be easier to show us the black and white, but Alma chooses the harder path, taking us through the gray area. Watching the film forces viewers to acknowledge their own complicated relationships; In my case the one I had with my biological father, which I’ve compartmentalized and downplayed my whole life. I had deluded myself into thinking I was content not to know exactly why he wasn’t there until I was in my 30s. I realize now that I still don’t know the answers to all the questions I’ve wanted to ask him. “Honey Boy” is Shia’s very personal childhood memoir but still somehow manages to become universal, interweaving the feelings and roles of child and parent, how those lines are all too often blurred. It’s about the feeling of failure and the feeling of fucking up. Not living up to expectations as the child and never being enough as the parent, how pride can be the most destructive thing to a family. It is emotionally disrupting watching it, not just as the former child but also as a mother who believes she’s doing it all wrong and the ripple effect she may have caused due to her mistakes. Alma’s work nails something which most films nowadays miss the mark at: it evokes a spectrum of very distinct feelings far too difficult to put into words alone. To convey the “unexplainable” in a way that is neither precious nor forced is incredibly difficult to achieve on film, but “Honey Boy” does that in the most compelling and honest way. By making the audience witnesses to the most painfully intimate moments, the film gives them the quiet space necessary to realize it may be possible to understand and feel deeply even for the person whom they had most wanted to despise. “Honey Boy” speaks the truth: that though you always hope there’s a good reason, most of the time the answers you find will never be enough."""