James: “When you get older, you start to learn about where you come from. You, honey boy, come from alcoholics. A long line of people who were hurting and didn't know what to do.”

Otis: “The only thing my father gave me of any value was pain. And now you want to take that away from me?”

Otis, as a child: “I’ve missed you for a long time, dad.”

James: “You know, a seed has to completely destroy itself to become a flower. It’s a violent act, honey boy.”

”At its core, Honey Boy is about what it means … to carry the weight of a generational curse. More professionally known as inherited or trans-generational trauma, this is the idea that our parents can pass on their pain to us when they are unable to heal it…a cycle that can seem unstoppable, until one child is able to find the proper tools to confront it, and therefore heal the wounds that were handed down to them.

Shia LaBeouf, in a brave act, embodies this by playing the character who represents his real-life father, James. He steps into the man who caused the trauma that led him to turn to alcohol, and he does so without malice or vengeance. In the movie, we are shown a portrait of a father who is not absolved of his crimes, but who is allowed empathy for the way in which he struggles. James, like Otis, had his pain handed down to him, and did not know what to do with it.

…he said, in speaking as part of The Hollywood Reporter Actor’s Roundtable, ‘[In rehab] I gained empathy for my father, who was always the biggest villain in my life. If you can empathize with the biggest villain in your life, and scrape some of these shadows, it makes you lighter and more free. ‘ " [via Alanna Grace, Honey Boy and the Magic of Breaking a Generational Curse]

Bunny Kinney, Nowness creative director says, “our ambition with this series of short films is not only to uphold and celebrate Leonard Cohen’s incredible artistic legacy with new visuals, helmed by some of the most exciting image-makers working today, but to also further explore Cohen’s work and the core thematics of his music: from love and loss to artistic expression itself, identity, self-reflection, transformation and transcendence.” —via NOWNESS

Now the angel's got a fiddle
The devil's got a harp
Every soul is like a minnow
Every mind is like a shark
Me, I've broken every window
But the house, the house is dark
I care, but very little
What happens to the heart

Then I studied with this beggar
He was filthy, he was scarred
By the claws of many women
He had failed to disregard
No fable here, no lesson
No singing meadowlark
Just a filthy beggar guessing
What happens to the heart

I was always working steady
But I never called it art
It was just some old convention
Like the horse before the cart
I had no trouble betting
On the flood, against the ark
You see, I knew about the ending
What happens to the heart

—Leonard Cohen

“My mind was always very cluttered, so, I took great pains to simplify my environment because if my environment was half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn’t be able to make it from room to room.”

“We all are motivated by deep impulses and deep appetite to serve, even though we may not be able to locate that which we are willing to serve.”

“Religion, teachers, women, drugs, the road, fame, money,” Adam quotes his father saying; “nothing gets me high and offers relief from the suffering like blackening pages, writing.” It was also, he writes in his foreword, “a statement of regret”, since Cohen sacrificed so much – he never married, considered himself a poor father, let his health and financial state decline – for the Muse. Amidst numerous liaisons and botched relationships, poetry is the one thing he remained entirely faithful to. The Flame is the incontrovertible proof. [via Romance, regrets and notebooks in the freezer: Leonard Cohen’s son on his father’s final poems]

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.” —Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being A Wall Flower