“Slauson Rec,” a documentary starring Shia LaBeouf and his mental trauma, is not a good movie. But it’s a timely artifact of one of the things movies are now up against — a pathological and vampiristic celebrity culture that sucks all the air out of the room. In 2018, LaBeouf posted a video on Twitter announcing the formation of a free weekly theater workshop that would meet every Saturday at the Slauson Recreation Center in South Central Los Angeles. Hundreds of people showed up for it, lured by the magnet of LaBeouf’s name. One of them was Leo Lewis O’Neil, a young man who wasn’t interested in being an actor but who volunteered to record the workshop on camera. Over the next three years, he shot hundreds of hours of footage of LaBeouf and his followers doing their experimental theater thing, writing and rehearsing several “plays” they presented in a nightclub and, ultimately, in a dusty parking lot.
The movie O’Neil has put together out of this footage, which premiered last night at Cannes, is by any real-world standard a slovenly and undisciplined piece of work. “Slauson Rec” is two-and-a-half hours long, and it’s little more than an endless dispiriting diary-like ramble. Yet it also functions as a vérité exploitation film, since the only thing in it that’s actually interesting is watching Shia LaBeouf parade himself as a kind of acting guru and mentor, only to descend into an increasingly furious and abusive and unhinged place that leaves us with the profound question, “What in the fuck’s name is going on here?”
Let’s be clear: Shia LaBeouf is not just someone in deep need of anger-management therapy. He’s an extraordinarily gifted actor (I was reminded of this just a couple of weeks ago, when I reviewed his forceful performance in the David Mamet film “Henry Johnson”), and he’s also the definition of a charismatic person. In “Slauson Rec,” whether he’s being supportive or hellacious, you can’t take your eyes off him. He’s got a stare of burning intensity and a hyper-articulate blunt showmanship that grows out of that quality. (He also has a penchant for sporting facial hair that looks like it came out of a costume shop.) In the documentary, he is always on, always making everything about him, with the underlying conviction that he’s the most arresting person in the room.
Early on, we give him the benefit of the doubt, since he seems to be employing his charisma in a generous way (volunteering his time to inspire a bunch of people in South Central). His volatile acting-coach showmanship feels like it’s part of a tradition, stretching all the way back to Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler and incorporating the exhibitionistic ethos of the let-it-all-hang-out, acting-as-self-actualization thing that defined the experimental theater movements of the late ’60s and ’70s. The Slauson Rec theater experiment, as LaBeouf explains it, is an attempt to gather people together and give them a club, a community, an artistic laboratory, a family. And in the eagerness of the participants to go along with whatever LaBeouf says, we feel the desperate hunger they have to belong. LaBeouf isn’t just showing them how to act. He’s giving them hope.
From the start, though, you may wonder what, exactly, he’s out to accomplish creatively. He talks a good game, like a theatrical cult leader, but he has the participants doing “devised theater,” which after a while seems to come down to a kind of ritual group body-tapping and choreographed aerobics. It looks like they’re doing an elaborate series of warm-up exercises, which is fine in the early weeks, when they’re just getting to know each other. But once they’ve been at this for months, it starts to become clear that LaBeouf doesn’t really have a plan. He’s just throwing stuff against the wall, using his heady psychodramatic acting-coach jargon and tough-love “I’m doing this for you!” personality to turn anything and everything into an “encounter session.” And given that these are not professional actors, or even (in most cases) people who aspire to be, LaBeouf’s words to them, full of deadly serious jabber about empathy and ego, are pumped up with an intensity that feels overdone and inappropriate.
And that’s before he starts blowing his fuse. Once the pandemic hits, the Slauson Recreation Center tosses the group out (at this point, they’ve melted down to about 50 people), and they wind up rehearsing with masks under the hot L.A. sun in an anonymous dusty parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence, with two tables under a red tent. The place becomes their sunlit prison (and ours). They’ve already put on one “play,” which looks, from what we see of it, like a glorified hip-hop open-mic night. Now they’re writing and rehearsing a follow-up, some sort of multimedia action-theater piece entitled “5711 Avalon,” though the film never gives us a halfway coherent idea of what it is.
Yet the more sketchy and aimless the Slauson Rec troupe becomes, the more LaBeouf seizes onto the notion that the members are not living up to what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re disappointing him (but only because he cares so much). He targets one member, a 22-year-old kid named Zeke, who seems like the sweetest guy, and LaBeouf starts to torment him like a drill sergeant who has picked out his patsy. “Don’t play that fuckin’ James Dean shit with me, dude,” he says. He also says things like, “I love you if you make my life better. If you make my life worse, I don’t love you. That’s how I’m built!” and “This is really the last of the refinements! You really need to pay attention to this shit!” and “I said giggle! What fuckin’ version of what the fuck I said is what the fuck you did?”
LaBeouf declares in the movie that he’s an alcoholic, and he talks, at one point, about how he’s always beating himself up in his own brain. But that’s not exactly reassuring. He’s got his shirt off a lot, baring the wall of chest tattoos he acquired to make the movie “The Tax Collector,” and we start to notice that he’s shouting all the time, as if the fate of the world were hanging on how effectively he can get this ragtag bunch of people to act. Yet we can’t even tell the difference between if they’re doing it well or doing it badly.
And that’s part of what’s so destabilizing about LaBeouf’s rants, his tantrums, his meltdowns. It’s not just that he’s being abusive toward these people (at several points physically). It’s that the whole damn spectacle of it starts to feel pointless. The “point,” of course, is that we’re getting to watch a well-known star in a state of breakdown. And the tabloid perversity of “Slauson Rec” is that even when he’s acting out, being a total dick to these hapless people who have put their trust in him, the movie is busy turning his self-destruction into theater.
Just when we think his abuse of poor Zeke can’t get any worse, LaBeouf turns his attention to Sarah, a troupe member whose mother is sick. He starts to berate her, and after her mother has died he informs her that he wants her to stop playing the role in their play she’s been playing, because he has decided that she’s “not right for the part.” In this meaningless shambolic parking-lot-theater mess? That he would say that is worse than harsh — to our eyes, it’s sadistic. And it just makes us think: Why are we even watching this?
I would wager that the commercial prospects for “Slauson Rec” will fall somewhere between dim and zero. The filmmaking, which just drags on (with helpful titles like “Day 56,” followed by “Day 57”), saps the energy right out of you. Yet the movie has the clueless arrogance to present itself as a redemption narrative — not for the members of the Slauson Rec troupe, but for Shia LaBeouf. After he is hit with a legal accusation of domestic abuse, he simply abandons the troupe. He doesn’t show up one day, and that’s it, it’s over. But the film ends on an interview with LaBeouf, conducted more recently, where he sits in a chair in the tasteful home he shares with Mia Goth and their child, and he goes back over the Slauson Rec experiment and admits that he’d gone off the deep end. He admits that his behavior was untenable, and that he had a “God complex.” He now feels bad about all of it. LaBeouf delivers this confession with an eloquent conviction that’s a little uncanny. But listening to it, you realize that one thing hasn’t changed, and that it may be the most unnerving thing about him: He’s still acting.
