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In November 2025, writer-director Josh Penn Soskin began production on his debut feature, “The Rooster Prince,” based on his relationship with his late brother, David, a renowned psychiatrist who suffered from bipolar
disorder. He cast Shia LaBeouf to play Eli, the character based on his brother, along with Jackson White and Melissa Leo. These are his reflections on the production.
Shia LaBeouf was exploding on set.
He was screaming across a parking lot, where his character, based on my brother (a renowned Harvard psychiatrist who had a manic-bipolar episode in his 40s) was now breaking down. He’d given a performance so brilliant, and often so meta, that I didn’t cut right away — because we’d lost a clear sense of what was movie and non-movie.
As I watched him unravel, tears and sweat in his eyes, I realized something. He was in deep pain. In fact, he was in even more pain than all the pain he was causing. This was the kind of pain I had seen in my late brother David’s eyes. Pain I couldn’t fully understand, or even soothe. Pain that eventually took him from me. And now, just three takes in, the scene and the day were over. Those in the blast radius were rightfully scared and hurt. Shia had vanished. The producers were palpably nervous. I was about six inches from a panic attack. I looked out at the big dusky Oklahoma sky, and I prayed to my brother for help. In about 12 hours, I would need to give a crew speech and summon the right words to save our now fragile film from derailing and yet, if I was being honest I had absolutely no idea what to say.
Let me back up for a moment, for context.
My brother was my best friend. He was my idol. He taught me to love literature and cinema alongside surfing and punk music. He regularly mixed words like “epistemology” with “gnarly.” He existed on tofu and broccoli. He read tomes of Greek mythology on the StairMaster, his long blond hair bouncing with sweat and obsession. I took notes. I was the understudy. In high school, we made plans to be the next Coen brothers.
But by college he’d drifted from me. He stopped studying Billy Wilder and started studying the brain. Later, I realized this wasn’t an affront to our relationship. He was trying to fix himself. By attaining god-like knowledge of his own mind.
He hid everything under the surface with expert precision. Until his manic break in 2017. He was caught running naked through the streets of Toronto, and placed in a mental hospital. He wrote violent poems. Claimed he’d been hacked by Apple. Engaged in fist fights with security guards. At the time, none of it made sense. Because he was also a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, highly renowned for his breakthrough research. He was ironically more expert at diagnosing mania, while manic, than the doctor diagnosing him. That dynamic later became inspiration for a scene I would write. The one Shia was prepping the night before my speech.
After agreeing to take Lithium that I’m now fairly certain he wasn’t taking, I got my brother out of the hospital and he came to live with me in California, where our relationship was oddly supercharged by the mania into a kind of rapid fire love story. This once withdrawn and nerdy professor was now attending his first ecstatic dance parties at age 40, blowing all of his money on Bitcoin and giving it away to strangers on Venice beach, blasting Kanye in a Mercedes he couldn’t afford and driving me unnervingly fast down the PCH on the way to surf pointbreaks together for the first time in years. In some of these fleeting moments, he was my dream brother. Deeply present with me in a way he’d never been. Giving me the worst and best moments of our life together.
Then he went fully dark, dropping into depression. His licence fell under investigation by the state psychiatry board. And within six months, he’d driven our mother’s Corolla off a cliff in Big Sur and just like that — the disease that had brought us closer than we’d ever been had taken him from me.
For years, I tried to make sense of this paradox with the script that became “The Rooster Prince.” I had two toddlers at home. It was COVID. And the only way I could process my grief was to write. To transmute it into some kind of cinema-catharsis. And, God willing, help others. My brother had left me with breadcrumbs. Clues. Dialogue. Poems and books he wrote while manic. He seemed to be writing the film with me.
Shia was immediately drawn to my brother as a character. He’d been open about his own struggles with addiction and PTSD, having made his own cathartic biopic, “Honey Boy.” Shia’s devotion to the work became nearly religious. He memorized Dave’s books. Worked night and day. It seemed he rarely slept. There was, inside of him, a kind of manic fire to make this film. He told me that at times it felt like Dave was speaking to him. Through him. And I saw, in Shia’s work, things he could never know unless this was true.
As director, I wanted to give audiences a raw, front row seat to a bipolar episode. And Shia wanted it to feel like he was inside a documentary. So I stripped away lights and crew and my cinematographer made the camera so small that he could cram into the backseat of a car on a manic roadtrip. I wanted the whole film to feel bipolar. And indeed the work itself was simultaneously ecstatic and painful.
Shia and I could fight terribly one day, and the next find ourselves in a deep embrace, tears streaming down our faces, locked into a bond that was so deep it can be only compared to what it felt like to hold my own brother. His brilliant work and my brother’s life started to merge unconsciously for me. Shia was going to the depths of hell and in the process, healing wounds I didn’t know were there. It was less like a movie and more like an Ayahuasca trip. Everybody was becoming everybody. Alternately laughing and sobbing our brains out. It was, for lack of a better word, fucking crazy.
So there’s the context. Halfway through a performance that would become the truest depiction of mental illness I’ve ever seen on camera.
And now I was about to lose the movie. Because I couldn’t find the words. What could I possibly tell these people? How could I reconcile that the very process doing them damage was also creating art with a real capacity for healing? How could I acknowledge their pain and his?
Jesus, there it was again, my old friend, Paradox, laughing at me as I lay in my hotel room bathtub at 3 a.m., insomniac, riddled with anxiety, still no answers. Buzzzzzzzz. My phone vibrates. A text.
It’s Shia.
He’s sent me a video. A self-tape rehearsal for the scene we are supposed to film in a few hours (assuming we still had a movie). This is how we worked, him texting me stuff in process. Less to critique. More to witness.
I click, and watch what I’d seen and written about in Toronto, now echoing through Shia, pacing his room, dressing down the prison psychiatrist with a barrage of brilliant, if slightly manic defenses for his own sanity. And then, mid-scene, breaking down, he inserts a new line: “All I ask from you is that you treat me with…maximum empathy.”
There were tears in his eyes. And now mine. Goosebumps spiked the skin on my arms. It was as if Shia had embedded a piece of code into the rehearsal tape and was speaking to me, not the prison psychiatrist. Maximum empathy. Now I knew what to say.
In my brother’s book, “Open Source Psychiatry,” he opened with a retelling of “The Rooster Prince” a Hasidic fable in which a young prince goes “crazy,” taking off his clothes, hiding naked under his parents dinner table and crowing like a Rooster, refusing to communicate in language. Finally, a mystical Rabbi arrives and shocks the king and queen by taking off all his clothing, getting under the table and crowing like a rooster. Maximum empathy.
The next morning, I stood in front of the crew and told them about my epiphany. My shaky voice quickly betrayed me. I started to cry. Others in the room cried too. They had their own mentally ill family members. Their own pain. My brother and Shia, I explained, were asking for the same thing.
“Maximum empathy” for the people who had been hurt, and also for those who had done the hurting.
This is a radical concept in today’s mental health culture, shaped by social media’s moralizing and rampant shaming. We applaud public figures who confess to anxiety or depression. Not to discount them: I’ve struggled with anxiety for years. But those conditions are easy to destigmatize. Because they’re mostly suffered behind closed doors. But what about the messier ones? Bipolar. Schizophrenia. Personality disorders. My brother sprinting naked through the streets of a foreign city. Or Kanye unleashing on Twitter. Well, that’s not quite as convenient for us.
Bipolar stories are ironically the perfect medicine for the world right now. Because the pathological internet culture we’re all drowning in is currently incapable of holding two conflicting truths at once. We’ve become algorithmically segregated. Anti-paradox by design. We’ve made things so neat and divided, we’ve lost the essential messiness that is the human experience.
I’ve spent the better part of a decade thinking about this. And yet, I don’t have answers. All I can say with certainty is that I love my brother. So deeply that the love outlasted mental illness, suicide and the long journey to make this film. It’s this basic human capacity for love that gives me faith. That we might one day transcend those distances between us. And hopefully begin a conversation that taps into our collective “maximum empathy.”
I first screened a rough cut of the film with a friend of mine in her mid-20s who had a sibling with bipolar, one I gathered she hadn’t been very connected with. When the film finished, snot dripping from our noses, eyes blood red with tears, she looked at me and said only: “I need to go call my brother.”
In February 2026, Shia LaBeouf was arrested during a physical altercation at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Last month, he pleaded guilty to three counts of simple battery and was sentenced to a six-month suspended sentence, two years of probation and alcohol treatment. LaBeouf was previously court-ordered to attend rehab following a 2017 arrest in Georgia for public intoxication and disorderly conduct during the filming of “Peanut Butter Falcon.” In December 2020, FKA Twigs sued LaBeouf, alleging sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress. The lawsuit was settled in July of last year.
Josh Penn Soskin is a writer, director and photographer. Josh’s first screenplay “Kill Yr Idols” won the comedy endowment at the Sundance Labs in 2023. He is currently wrapping post-production on his directorial feature debut titled “The Rooster Prince” — a road trip dramedy about two brothers starring Shia LaBeouf, Jackson White and Melissa Leo, based on his experience of losing his brother to bipolar. Josh’s photography has also been shown in galleries around the world.
