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Nick Reiner, who struggled with drug addiction, wrote “Being Charlie” during a period of sobriety. His father directed the film.
Rob and Nick Reiner speaking about their film “Being Charlie” in New York in 2016.Credit...Laura Cavanaugh/FilmMagic, via Getty Images
Dec. 15, 2025, 4:54 p.m. ET
Even when it was first released, “Being Charlie,” the 2016 film co-written by Nick Reiner and directed by his father, the filmmaker Rob Reiner, had an almost uncomfortable resonance with the family’s life as they faced Nick’s addiction struggles.
On Sunday, Nick Reiner was arrested on the suspicion of murder in the death of his father and his mother, Michele Singer Reiner. He is being held in a Los Angeles jail without bail.
Nick was 22 w…
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Nick Reiner, who struggled with drug addiction, wrote “Being Charlie” during a period of sobriety. His father directed the film.
Rob and Nick Reiner speaking about their film “Being Charlie” in New York in 2016.Credit...Laura Cavanaugh/FilmMagic, via Getty Images
Dec. 15, 2025, 4:54 p.m. ET
Even when it was first released, “Being Charlie,” the 2016 film co-written by Nick Reiner and directed by his father, the filmmaker Rob Reiner, had an almost uncomfortable resonance with the family’s life as they faced Nick’s addiction struggles.
On Sunday, Nick Reiner was arrested on the suspicion of murder in the death of his father and his mother, Michele Singer Reiner. He is being held in a Los Angeles jail without bail.
Nick was 22 when “Being Charlie” premiered. He had been in and out of rehab since he was 15. He wrote the script during a period of sobriety, with a friend, Matt Elisofon, whom he had met in rehab, Nick said at the time.
The film follows Charlie, a Los Angeles teenager who abuses drugs and who has a turbulent relationship with his father, a big-shot actor-turned-gubernatorial-candidate played by Cary Elwes (a star of Rob Reiner’s “The Princess Bride”). They clash regularly — over Charlie’s care, over his father’s motives as he pursues his own ambitions.
Charlie (Nick Robinson) is a comedy nerd who name-drops vintage stand-up comedians like Moms Mabley and Lord Buckley. He has tried a few open mics, and he’s fast enough to freestyle rap with a friend. But at 18, he is mainly a heroin addict.
The story opens with Charlie busting out of a Christian-oriented recovery ranch, hurtling a rock through a stained-glass window. Soon enough, he is stealing OxyContin pills before being packed off to another facility as his father campaigns to be governor of California.
(In 2006, the elder Mr. Reiner, a longtime political activist, considered running for governor of California; he didn’t in part because, as he told The New Yorker, Nick vetoed the idea: “He said, ‘No, Dad! We won’t be able to go bike riding!’”)
In the movie, Charlie’s mother is cast as a more sympathetic, and present, figure than his father. She visits her son when he makes it to a halfway house, and supports his gaining more freedom. His dad is depicted as an operator who suavely lies, to both his son and the press, to maintain his image. (Rob Reiner pushed for that unsympathetic portrayal, Mr. Elwes told The Los Angeles Times in 2015. “He would tell me he didn’t handle it well and we had to show that.”)
Following experts’ advice, Charlie’s father wants him to stay in rehab over his son’s protestations that the programs don’t work for him. That, too, mirrored what the Reiner family had experienced. “We were desperate,” Rob Reiner told The Los Angeles Times, “and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”
When a romantic relationship with a fellow patient backfires, Charlie smashes a window in his parents’ home and — after a shouting confrontation with his father — drives off with one of their cars. Another relapse follows, with Charlie scoring drugs on the streets and sleeping in homeless shelters, as Nick said he had.
The movie, which runs just over 90 minutes and features Nick’s brother Jake Reiner in a small part, ends on a somewhat upward turn.
After a friend’s overdose, Charlie seems to want to change his trajectory. “I don’t want to die,” he tells his mother. He and his father have a teary moment of reconciliation, a scene that Rob Reiner said had been rewritten many times as he and his son came to understand more about their own relationship.
“All I ever wanted was a way to kill the noise,” Charlie says in the film’s closing moments. “But the more I used, the louder it got.”
“I was part of the noise, wasn’t I?” his father replies.
The film received mostly negative reviews, and earned a pittance at the box office. But Rob Reiner said making it had been its own reward, a form of therapy as he and his son found a new connection.
The year “Being Charlie” came out, Nick Reiner credited his mother and father with helping him. “I don’t have a sober coach,” he told People, “but I have very loving and supportive parents. That’s a huge part of it. Not everybody gets that.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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