The follow-up to Honey Boy will be a biographical fiction about the American rapper
Shia LaBeouf’s debut screenplay, Honey Boy only just hit cinemas last year, but the actor is already working on its follow-up: a biographical film about Brockhampton’s Kevin Abstract.
According to The Playlist, LaBeouf has finished his second feature-length script, called Minor Modifications, which is “based on the life of rapper Kevin Abstract”. The film’s synopsis reads: “This biographical fiction follows a Texas teen as he struggles with identity, finding meaningful relationships, sexual fluidity, and his direction in life.”
LaBeouf and Abstract’s friendship developed after they began group therapy together in the Brockhampton house in LA. Discussing the sessions in an interview with Dazed in June 2019, LaBeouf said: “It’s about half full of artists and half full of people who are just friends of artists, regular people, it’s quite a varied eclectic group but all round the same age, and we sit in this man’s kitchen and we go around in a circle, sort of like a 12-step meeting and we don’t talk about solution, we don’t try to solve each other’s problems, but we do listen to each other deeply. It goes on for like four or five hours because the group will sometimes be 40 or 50 people in the room.”
The actor continued: “I think these groups started as a way for Ian (Kevin Abstract) to teach himself how to be empathetic to other people, and so he spends a lot of his time listening. He actually speaks less than most people in the room until quite recently.”
“We’re physicalising the thing that is so attractive to us all about social media,” LaBeouf added, “which is that instant connection and that knowledge that I’m going to walk into this room and there’s going to be 40 people who are going to talk to me. No matter what I look like or what I sound like or what I did last week or what I’m wearing or how I feel, I am going to be able to have 40 people talk to me and share with me and open up to me and connect with me, and it brings us closer and it does have a healing effect.”
Minor Modifications will see LaBeouf return to writing after the critical success of Honey Boy – a biographical film about his own life, in which he played the role of his father. Based on the actor’s screenplay, the film was brought to life by filmmaker Alma Har’el, and followed LaBeouf’s childhood and early adult years as he struggled with his mental health and relationship with his father.
There’s no news yet on when production might begin on Minor Modifications, or whether LaBeouf or Abstract will star in the film.