A Chronicle of Shia LaBeouf’s Theater Experiment

Slauson Rec, drawn from a number of years’ price of intimate video recordings of an experimental theater firm, is a honest exploration of collective creativity. It’s additionally the most recent chapter within the Shia LaBeouf saga, the stuff {of professional} acclaim and offscreen headlines. Though LaBeouf isn’t the creator of the documentary, he’s the architect of the mission it chronicles. You would possibly name him the brutalist.

First-time director Leo Lewis O’Neil, who additionally dealt with all of the camerawork, was one of many 200 or so individuals who responded to LaBeouf’s 2018 Twitter video saying the formation of a free weekly theater workshop on the Slauson Recreation Heart in South Los Angeles. Most had been, like O’Neil, younger and ardent admirers of the actor, who at that time was between motion pictures and had a distinct sort of artistic itch to scratch. Not like the others, O’Neil wasn’t excited about performing, however, “determined to be a part of something he did,” provided his companies as archivist for the “social science experiment,” as LaBeouf himself would later, ruefully, describe it.

Drawn from footage Lewis shot over a seven-year interval, with most of it from the college’s three-year run, Slauson Rec data the stops and begins, the anything-can-happen electrical energy as bonds kind, concepts blossom and strangers take possibilities collectively. Lewis was there for the frustrations and breakthroughs, the elation when issues clicked and, more and more, the meltdowns. As time went on, he discovered himself within the midst of a slow-motion prepare wreck.

A good portion of the movie’s operating time entails LaBeouf, in all his mercurial splendor, dropping his shit. He rants. He fumes. He storms off. On a few events he will get bodily with members of the troupe. However that is no quick-hit gotcha. It’s clearly a private story for Lewis, who was new to L.A. and alone when he ventured to the rec heart and located not simply one thing to do however a household. Poring over the group’s dynamics, he needs to grasp what drove its chief. He would possibly even wish to assist him exorcise the dangerous vibes. He bookends the principle occasions with an interview with an older-and-wiser LaBeouf, married and elevating a toddler with Mia Goth and copping to the “god complicated” that drove him to make others endure for his artwork.

There’s greater than somewhat hyperbole in LaBeouf’s mea culpa when he calls the unintended outcomes of his habits “fascistic.” And the documentary’s ample operating time — two and half hours — could be interpreted as an endorsement of the epic significance that LaBeouf hooked up to his Slauson Rec Theater Firm.

But the doc is under no circumstances a slog. It’s sensitively shot and sharply edited, and its power flows. The identical depth that LaBeouf brings to his performing pours out of almost each interplay he has within the movie. Whether or not he’s enraged or kvelling, he has such a compelling means with phrases, and such an animated physicality, that he’s nearly endlessly watchable. Nearly. The dramatic exits lose their drama after some time. And there are fairly a number of of them, particularly when rehearsals are in full swing for 5711 Avalon, the modern pandemic-era manufacturing that may be Slauson Rec’s largest and final manufacturing.

Slauson Rec could be a extra inviting and efficient expertise if it had been expanded barely and reshaped right into a two- or three-part cable docuseries. We don’t want nitty-gritty particulars, however a bit extra data concerning the multimedia play 5711 Avalon would have been a welcome substitute for a number of the repetitive situations of behind-the-scenes battle, as watchable as they’re. (It’s not laborious to think about a few of these sequences as grist for a future episode of Documentary Now! That’s a praise.)

Actors Bobby Soto and Donte “Bo” Johnson, who met LaBeouf on the set of The Tax Collector, had been his co-founders within the theater firm, however there’s no query that he’s the top honcho, the raison d’être. Many years earlier, the charismatic maverick John Cassavetes had completed one thing comparable, pouring his personal Hollywood cash right into a Los Angeles theater mission. Not like Cassavetes, LaBeouf had no well-known actors in his troupe, and it could take some time earlier than he centered on scripted materials.

Within the early months, workshop classes are dedicated to movement-based “devised theater,” with an emphasis on improvisation and collaborative creation. The college’s numbers dwindle as these searching for extra typical performing classes fall away. Among the many ones who keep, spirits run excessive, and there’s a fevered pleasure because the group plans its first public efficiency, with LaBeouf enthusing over “in all probability one of the best factor I’ve ever been part of.” In an interview performed at his hillside aerie, the actor emphasizes his starvation to create with others. However it isn’t lengthy earlier than harsh rebukes punctuate his encouragement. Notably, his first main tantrum occurs on a day when he factors out that he hasn’t been to AA a lot that week.

Months earlier, the five-minute private introduction that LaBeouf delivered to kickstart the group’s first assembly revealed a story formed by outsiderness, trauma, alcoholism and restoration — no shock to anybody who has seen Honey Boy, the autobiographical function he penned and starred in. That film, shot and launched across the similar time as his Slauson Rec mission was taking form, revolves round LaBeouf’s troubled relationship together with his manipulative father. Now, beneath Lewis’ vigilant eye, we see LaBeouf turning into an explosive paternal determine, one who declares his love “conditional” and taunts the group with offended reminders of his beneficence. “I’m doing every part!” he sputters in response to disappointing read-throughs.

Along with LaBeouf’s mounting volatility, there are tensions inside the group over its position within the speedy neighborhood — an important query for the humanities basically in a rustic of maximum financial disparity. Then comes the COVID shutdown, bringing that disparity to the fore with out really addressing it. However, with 5711 Avalon, LaBeouf & Co. tried. Born of the pandemic and really a lot about it, the play is ready in a COVID testing website. Fueled by a Hollywood star’s earnings, it’s a play that focuses on frontline staff. It will be rehearsed and carried out in a South L.A. car parking zone, and when it opened in October 2020, well-known individuals — Jaden Smith, Sean Penn — confirmed up for the drive-in expertise.

O’Neil zeroes in on three castmembers who discover themselves on the receiving finish of LaBeouf’s invective: Sarah Kaplan, Sam Walker and Ezekiel “Zeke” Pacheco, an formidable actor from South L.A. who books a task on Netflix’s On My Block throughout rehearsals however stays dedicated to the play. Amid the underlying stress and uncertainty of the pandemic, LaBeouf is masked and harmful, his outbursts a surprising mixture of self-awareness and lack of management.

Although not a performer, O’Neil is clearly a full-fledged and well-liked member of the troupe, and the time he spends away from rehearsals with Kaplan and particularly Pacheco, providing glimpses of their households, is fueled by profound affection. At one level throughout one in every of LaBeouf’s parking-lot freakouts, O’Neil zeros in on somewhat child within the next-door yard, watching via the fence in alarm and amazement. You get a way that the filmmaker needs he, too, might toddle away and never give this grown-up however infantile drama a second thought. However, lastly, Slauson Rec is outlined by gratitude and love at least harm and confusion. Pointing his digital camera on the man who purchased it for him, he sees somebody fumbling towards grace.