The actor and Transformers star Shia LaBeouf is no stranger to controversy. Over the past decade the 38-year-old has become known as much for his arrests for disorderly conduct and public intoxication as his intense screen performances. In December 2020 he was sued by the singer-songwriter FKA Twigs, an ex-girlfriend, for sexual battery, assault and the infliction of emotional distress (he has denied the allegations; the much delayed trial is set for September).
None of this, however, can quite prepare you for the Shia LaBeouf featured in the behind-the-scenes documentary and buzzy Cannes Film Festival entry Slauson Rec. In the movie, shot over three years and culled from hundreds of hours of footage, LaBeouf is captured in the process of assembling an avant-garde theater company in Los Angeles. He emerges during that time as a thermonuclear rage machine, someone who is as brittle and thin-skinned as he is aggressive and insensitive, and who instinctively and mercilessly abuses his collaborators, peppering them with expletives.
At one low point, for instance, an aspiring actress and LaBeouf superfan called Sarah, whose mother has died only days before, questions LaBeouf’s direction of her performance. “Get in your f***ing spot and shut up!” he roars at her, before launching a personalized attack. She immediately starts to weep, but, in the face of more abuse, chokes out the response, “My mother just died, you asshole!” Unmoved and still ranting, LaBeouf shoots back a withering, “And how long are you going to juice that orange?” He will fire Sarah within a fortnight, cruelly dismissing her with a barked, “It’s about the best art, not about your feelings.”
And it all started so well. In 2018 LaBeouf posted an inspirational call to arms on Twitter, demanding that brave artists should come to the Slauson Recreation Center in South Central Los Angeles and there, every weekend, they would begin a groundbreaking theater club. “There are no actors in this room,” says the seductive and charismatic LaBeouf on the first day of class in a space packed with fans and aspiring creatives. “There are just moment makers.”
The film’s director, Leo Lewis O’Neil — who arrived with LaBeouf in Cannes two weeks ago to promote the movie — was one of those wannabes. When LaBeouf spotted him clutching a camera, he agreed that O’Neil should become the project’s personal “archivist”. And so what’s captured initially is a different kind of thespian horror — theater kids unleashed, lots of writhing and primal screaming, and LaBeouf giving nebulous instructions such as, “You now have ten minutes to build your temples and connect your tissues.”
There are montages of the group progressing happily, but somewhere around week 29 the temperature plummets. LaBeouf, a reformed alcoholic, marches in and announces, “I didn’t get a whole lot of AA this week.” Then he starts hollering at and cruelly demeaning the actors around him. Based on O’Neil’s footage, he rarely relents for the next two years. During this time the pandemic strikes and LaBeouf decides to write, produce and direct a structurally complex play that’s set in a Covid testing site.
The Slauson Rec group’s rehearsals for this show, called 5711 Avalon, are confined to a sun-scorched LA car park and complicated by Covid testing, mask-wearing and a nakedly abusive LaBeouf. His yelling is incessant, his chair-flinging habitual. A typical tirade begins with a hysterical roar of: “This is absolute dog shit!”
The focus of LaBeouf’s ire is soon trained on Zeke, a 22-year-old whose previous actorly credit is a small role in the Netflix show On My Block. Zeke inexplicably provokes an all-out attack from LaBeouf, who throws himself at the actor when the young novice allegedly shakes his shoulders the wrong way. After the play’s second performance, a disgruntled LaBeouf turns on another actor, Sam, who has failed to giggle on command. Inches away from Sam’s face, he snarls, “I hate you to the core, because you think you know more than me. Why didn’t you giggle?” Again the confrontation ends physically, with LaBeouf throwing Sam up against a wall.
Other actors have been caught in similar situations. Christian Bale and Tom Cruise have been filmed “ranting” on set — remember Bale’s infamous and much memed, “What don’t you f***ing understand?” There is, meanwhile, a long-established Tinseltown tradition of “demanding” directors, including Stanley Kubrick and James Cameron, who have been known for yelling their casts into terrified puddles. Kubrick infamously “molded” Shelley Duvall’s performance in The Shining with furious shouts and hectoring remarks.
What’s different here is the relentlessness of the abuse and the insight that O’Neil’s film offers into the sinister mechanics of Hollywood. LaBeouf’s collaborators submit to the ranting almost willingly, certainly silently; nobody resists him constantly pushing his way into people’s space either — even those bigger, stronger men who could. And that’s because LaBeouf is clearly protected by the magical force field that fame provides. His fame, or possible access to that level of fame, remains intoxicating to those around him at all times. To resist would mean the end of this access. And so, perversely, the victims become the enablers, and LaBeouf unchecked drops into a histrionic persona that seems very familiar, certainly very movie-like — imagine a cross between Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and R Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. Eventually LaBeouf’s outbursts acquire an eerie structural rhythm: there’s an initial expletive-laden tirade followed by a momentary respite, followed by an even bigger blast; a short and destructive detonation, followed by a truly devastating explosion.
Is it art? Is it a stunt? LaBeouf appeared in Cannes seemingly endorsing the movie alongside O’Neil. He told Vanity Fair: “I gave Leo this camera and encouraged him to share his vision and his personal experience without edit … I wish only good things for Leo and everyone who was part of the Slauson Rec Company.” In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter he considered the effect that Slauson Rec may have on (what’s left of?) his reputation. “It isn’t any worse than what’s been said about me previously … I think, at heart, I’m a good guy … Is my process ugly and disgusting? Yes. Have I done horrible shit in the past that I’m going to have to make amends for, for the rest of my life? Yes. Does this movie change any of that? No.”
The documentary concludes with the sudden dissolution of the theater group after the FKA Twigs lawsuit is announced. A title card reads “Two years later” and a contrite LaBeouf reflects on his time at Slauson Rec and how he was suffering from what he calls a “god complex”. And the rest of the group and the lives he impacted negatively? He scratches his beard and says, with typical blinkless vigor, “I’d like to make amends, to see everybody, to clean it up. I don’t know how to do that, but I want to try.” He seems sincere, almost broken. As the last long shot lingers on our volatile subject, this may be the most intense Shia LaBeouf performance yet.
Kevin Maher is the chief film critic at The Times of London and the author of two novels, The Fields and Last Night on Earth
