Hot on the heels of Timothée Chalamet starring in Beautiful Boy comes another indie movie about rich white kids deep into drugs. This time the addict is Ben (the reliably good Lucas Hedges), who has checked himself out of rehab to spend Christmas Eve at home. His mother, Holly (Julia Roberts), is nervously delighted; his stepfather, Neal (Courtney B Vance), is incensed. “If you were black he would be in jail by now,” he tells her. Roberts is convincing as a parent torn between wanting to trust her son and needing to take responsibility. “This is humiliating,” he says, when she searches him in a shopping mall changing room. “This is love,” she replies. The material feels more like a play than a film, its drama shrunk down into a single, digestible day, but it’s affecting in its muted seriousness.
