It’s difficult to give an unfavorable review to a film that’s well-acted and brings attention to a social issue that deserves our concern, but I’m going to do it.

“Beautiful Boy” is a story about a father’s efforts to help his son break free from multiple drug addictions, based on memoirs written by the father, David Sheff, and his son, Nic Sheff.

And yet, in spite of powerful performances from both Steve Carell as David and Timothée Chalamet as Nic, this tale felt one-sided from the father’s perspective, even during those scenes that obviously were drawn from the son’s memoir.

Carell has long since proven his bona fides as a dramatic actor, and his range is showcased again here by his portrayal of David’s tortured attempts to grapple with his son’s addictions in an orderly fashion.

Maura Tierney shines for a few moments as David’s current wife and Nic’s stepmother, as she forces David to face the reality that he can’t fight his son’s battles for him. David eventually imparts this message to his ex-wife,

Nic’s biological mother (played by Amy Ryan, Carell’s costar from “The Office”), when Nic goes missing under her care, just as he had under his father’s watch.

But for the most part, this is a two-man tale of a flawed but earnestly concerned and loving father, and his gifted but wayward son.

Chalamet and Carell convey a lived-in relationship between father and son, including a painfully authentic cycle of the son’s sincere pledges to clean up his act followed by the crushing shame of having to face up to his father after his relapses.

The problem is — aside from David flipping through a notebook that Nic left unattended out of narrative convenience, a brief speech by Nic to his fellow recovering addicts after he’s been clean for a while, and an overly long recitation of one of Charles Bukowski’s overrated poems — I didn’t really get as much of a sense of what was driving Nic.

Nic mentions in passing that he has a thrill-seeking nature, and his interactions with David show signs of the son feeling pressure to achieve from his father, but his relapses seem to be inspired by random windows of opportunity more than anything else.

Moreover, Nic is shown hitting what seems to be rock bottom so many times that I wondered what made the difference in the final crash, which apparently led him to stay sober for eight years and counting, according to the closing narrative text.

Ironically, Chalamet is so effective at inhabiting the all-too-smooth excuse-making of a practiced liar that even his moments of breaking down and losing his composure feel like they’re being observed from the outside, from his father’s perspective.

It’s impossible not to root for Carell as David, as he hopes that each relapse will be his son’s last.

And yet, in spite of Chalamet’s impressive performance, this film didn’t give me any deeper insights into how Nic eventually learned to deal with his addictions, which I can’t help but feel would be useful for those who are coping with similar issues.

It doesn’t give me any pleasure to criticize such an otherwise well-made film, but especially when a film seeks to inform people about such a pressing personal and societal problem, its near-omission of one of the two central perspectives at the heart of its narrative can’t help but make it feel incomplete.

Based on Chalamet’s performance, I’m looking forward to seeing him star as Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune.”