Shia LaBeouf: is there genius in his madness?

Transformation is rarely as smooth as the movies make out. Turning a nerd into a cool cat requires hours in wardrobe, no matter that any on-screen makeover might take a minute; shifting trucks into giant robots demands weeks, often months, of pixel-wrangling. And these changes are wrought behind closed doors: effectuating such transformations while in the public eye has long proven doubly difficult. Macauley Culkin, Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes: the child actors who became tabloid fodder are legion. With Shia LaBeouf, star of two controversial new releases and countless recent off-screen brouhahas, the passage from teen idol to leading man has been scarcely less turbulent.

In Berlin this past weekend to promote Nymphomaniac, a two-volume adult odyssey in which he dons a curious mock-English accent and removes his clothes, LaBeouf walked out of a press conference after repeating Eric Cantona’s epigram about sardines and seagulls; at that evening’s premiere, he posed for photographers with a paper bag inked with the words “I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE” over his head. Even for someone who’d just worked with Lars von Trier, this was eccentric behaviour. What brings one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars to start covering their face, and mouthing the utterances of footballers?

To say LaBeouf has come a long way is an understatement. Born in 1986, he first came to prominence as the smart-mouthed hero of the Disney Channel show Even Stevens; he won a Daytime Emmy in 2003, the year he hit the big screen with the successful family romp Holes. Plain-sailing career progression belied off-camera struggles, however. LaBeouf’s parents – a ballerina and a Vietnam veteran battling dependency issues – separated early in his childhood. Son took care of father, paying him to stay clean as his legal guardian on the Even Stevens set, shuttling him to AA meetings at the close of shooting.

By 2010, after running around in Michael Bay’s Transformers films and the Indiana Jones reboot, LaBeouf was being heralded by Forbes as the world’s most bankable star, pipping Daniel Radcliffe and Johnny Depp. Yet, though successful, the movies, plainly, weren’t great: with maturity came growing doubts about this easy money, and what to do with himself once he’d ensured his security, and that of his loved ones, for life. There were drunken brawls, arrests for loitering, car wrecks both figurative and literal. “The hardest thing… is dealing with all this idle time,” he confessed in a 2011 Details profile. “That’s when I get into trouble.”

Reading LaBeouf’s uncommonly candid interviews, you realise three things. First, that he must be a nightmare for PRs; second, that he’s funnier and more interesting in person than the movies have thus far allowed him to be; and thirdly that, like many performers, he finds echoes of family on set. “My director is my god, my rock, my mother, my father, my lover, my brother, my enemy,” he blurted in 2012. This can generate its own problems, of course. Relations with Steven Spielberg, a sometime mentor, cooled after LaBeouf ventured the (not wholly misinformed) opinion they “dropped the ball” on Indy 4.

With Bay, matters proved more combative. While filming the third Transformers, LaBeouf was preparing for a less robotic scene by listening to Feist’s downtempo number “Brandy Alexander”. A furious Bay ripped out the actor’s headphones and cranked up the Dark Knight score instead. It was a conflict of diverging sensibilities; the 24-year-old star had outgrown his 46-year-old director. LaBeouf moved on, griping that the studios “give you the money, then… come to the set and stick a finger up your ass for five months." Bay has since shot Transformers 4, with the Irish actor Jack Reynor installed as co-lead.

If there is any real downside to being young, photogenic and paid $15m on a regular basis, this is it. Hollywood has come to regard the likes of LaBeouf as disposable freelancers: cheap relative to more established stars, there to fill space between the explosions the summer audience really wants to see. (Few went to Transformers because it was “a Shia LaBeouf movie”.) The actor understood this better than anybody: “There’s this coming-of-age thing that’s happening… I have these yearnings to do different things." Warren Beatty, another performer compelled to prove he wasn’t just a pretty face, was cited as an inspiration.

Aggressively pushing his boundaries, LaBeouf began going toe-to-toe with notorious directorial taskmasters and proven acting heavyweights. He brawled with Tom Hardy while shooting 2011’s Lawless, and clashed with Alec Baldwin during rehearsals for the Broadway play Orphans. He travelled to Romania and dropped acid, spooking co-star Rupert Grint, during the filming of this week’s grungy, violent thriller Charlie Countryman, and prepared for Nymphomaniac by stripping in the promo for Sigur Rós’s “Fjögur Píanó”, a delicate episode of physical theatre almost certainly absent from the Michael Bay playlist.

Writing and directing his own short, howardcantour.com, allowed the suddenly over-exposed actor to assert some further creative control; early Cannes reviews suggested it was a confident debut. Trouble began when the film emerged online late last year, allowing many to note its direct and uncredited lifts from Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel Justin M. Damiano. Caught in a Twitter storm, LaBeouf gave varyingly sincere responses, including the offer of a skywritten apology, before insisting this wasn’t plagiarism but “performance art” – pleading the Joaquin Phoenix defence, as it were. (Phoenix enacted a similar meltdown while filming 2009’s I’m Still Here.)

Whether this is art or merely next-gen Hollywood acting-up, LaBeouf has committed to it. He’s published an online manifesto (metamodernism.org), and even touted a performance piece to gallerists, in which he invited visitors to take a Clowes anthology to his contrite form. (There are similarities to Marina Abramović’s 1974 piece Rhythm 0.) Look at the Berlin footage, and you’ll see the actor carefully replicates the dramatic gulp of water Cantona took between phrases back in 1995; his paper mask’s mantra is one LaBeouf has insistently Tweeted – thereby repeating himself – since announcing his retirement from public life in January.

Something’s going on here, and it may be that von Trier – equally persecuted and prankish, enthusiastic compiler of manifestos – has replaced Spielberg as LaBeouf’s mentor, and given his charge constructive ways of filling all that idle time: if not original ideas, exactly, then at least some knowledge of a world beyond sequels. (Better to replay others for sport than repeat yourself at the behest of Hollywood paymasters, perhaps.) Channelling Beckett, point seven of the Metamodernist manifesto insists “Error breeds sense”. We must wait to see what emerges once this particular pupal stage is completed, and the paper bag comes off. 

A version of this article ran on today's Telegraph film website. The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman opens in cinemas nationwide on Friday; Nymphomaniac: Volumes 1 and 2 open in selected cinemas on February 22.