In November 2025, writer and director Josh Penn Soskin began production on his debut feature, The Rooster Prince, based on his relationship with his late brother David, a famous psychiatrist who suffered from bipolar disorder. He cast Shia LaBeouf as Eli, a character based on his brother, along with Jackson White and Melissa Leo. These are my thoughts on his production.
Shia LaBeouf was having a blast on set.
He continued to scream in the parking lot, where his character, based on my brother (a well-known Harvard psychiatrist who suffered from manic bipolar disorder in his 40s), was disintegrating. He gave such great acting, and often so meta acting, that I didn’t make the cut right away. Because we had lost a clear sense of cinema and non-cinema.
As I watched his expression relax, his eyes filled with tears and sweat, 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 saw in my late brother David’s eyes. A pain that I could never fully understand or even quell. The pain that finally took him from me. And in just three takes, the scene and the day were over. Those within the blast radius were understandably frightened and hurt. Shia has disappeared. The producers were clearly nervous. I had a panic attack at about 6 inches. I looked out into the dark sky of Oklahoma and asked my brother for help. I had about 12 hours to give a speech to the crew and call out the right words to save the crumbling film from derailing, and to be honest, I had no idea what to say.
Shia LaBeouf and Jackson White
Provided by Josh Penn Soskin
Let me back up a bit for context.
My brother was my best friend. he was my idol. He taught me to love literature and movies, as well as surfing and punk music. He often mixed words like “epistemology” and “discomfort.” He was present on tofu and broccoli. He read a book on Greek mythology on the Stairmaster, his long blonde hair bouncing with sweat and obsession. I took notes. I was a substitute. When we were in high school, we planned to become the next Coen Brothers.
But by college he had moved away from me. He stopped studying Billy Wilder and started studying the brain. Later I realized that this was not an insult to our relationship. He was trying to correct himself. By acquiring a godlike knowledge of your own mind.
He hid everything under the surface with professional precision. Until I came out of a manic episode in 2017. He was caught running naked through the streets of Toronto and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. He wrote violent poetry. He claimed to have been hacked by Apple. He got into a physical fight with a security guard. None of it made sense at the time. Because he was also a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and was very famous for his groundbreaking research. Ironically, even though he was manic, he was a better expert at diagnosing mania than the doctors diagnosing him. That dynamic inspired the scenes I would later write. The Shia had prepared it the night before my speech.
After agreeing to take lithium, which I’m sure he wasn’t taking, I discharged my brother from the hospital and came to live with me in California. So our relationship was strangely accelerated into a kind of rapid love story by mania. Once a reclusive nerd, this professor turned 40, went to his first ecstatic dance party, put all his money into Bitcoin and gave it away to strangers on Venice Beach, blew up the Mercedes Kanye couldn’t afford, and drove me down PCH at an unnerving speed on our way to surfing Point Break together for the first time in years. In a fleeting moment, he was the brother of my dreams. Be deeply present with me in a way he has never been before. You brought together the worst and best moments of our lives.
Then he went black and fell into depression. His license was subject to investigation by the state psychiatry board. And less than six months later, he pushed our mother’s Corolla off a cliff in Big Sur, and just like that, the disease that had brought us closer together than ever before took him away from me.
I’ve been trying to understand this contradiction for years in the script that became “The Rooster Prince.” There were two young children at home. It was Corona. And the only way I could process my grief was to write. To transform that into a kind of cinematic catharsis. And may God please help others. My brother left me breadcrumbs. clue. Dialogue. The poems and books he wrote during his manic episodes. It was like he was writing a movie with me.
Shia was immediately drawn to the character of the older brother. He made his own cathartic biopic, Honey Boy, and spoke openly about his struggles with addiction and PTSD. The Shia’s dedication to this work became almost religious. He memorized Dave’s book. I worked day and night. It seemed like he had hardly slept. There was a kind of feverish passion in his heart to make this film. He told me that sometimes he felt like Dave was talking to him. through him. And I saw in Shire’s work something that I would never have known if it were not true.
As a director, I wanted to give the audience a live, front-row seat to a bipolar episode. And Shia wanted people to feel like they were in the documentary. So I removed the lights and crew, and the cinematographer made the camera small enough to cram into the back seat of a car on a manic road trip. I wanted the whole movie to feel bipolar. And in fact, the task itself was both ecstatic and painful.
Shia and I would have a bad fight one day, and then the next day we would have a deep hug, tears streaming down our faces, and our bond may have been so deep that I can only compare it to the feeling I had when I hugged my own little brother. His wonderful work and my brother’s life began to merge unconsciously for me. Shia went to the depths of hell, and in the process, her wounds that I didn’t know about were also healed. It was more like an ayahuasca trip than a movie. Everyone was becoming everyone. Laughter and sobs alternate. It was, for lack of a better word, really crazy.
So there’s context. Midway through a performance that is 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 should I say to these people? How do we reconcile that the very process of damaging them is also creating art with real healing potential? How can I recognize them and his pain?
Jesus, here I come again, my old friend Paradox laughed as he saw me lying in my hotel room bathtub at 3 a.m., insomniac, anxiety-ridden, and still unable to find answers. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz. My cell phone vibrates. text.
This is Shia-chan.
He sent me a video. A self-tape rehearsal for a scene we were supposed to shoot in a few hours (assuming there was still a movie). This is how we work and he would text me what was going on. There will be less criticism. Please witness more.
I clicked through and watched what I saw and wrote about in Toronto. Shire paces the room, dressing up the prison psychiatrist with a series of brilliant, if slightly manic, defenses for his own sanity. Then, in the middle of the scene, while crying, he inserts a new line. “All I ask of you is that you treat me with the utmost empathy.”
There were tears in his eyes. And now it’s mine. Goosebumps appeared on the skin of my arms. It was as if Shia had put some code into the rehearsal tape and was talking to me instead of the prison psychiatrist. Maximum empathy. Now I know what to say.
In my brother’s book “Open Source Psychiatry,” he begins with a retelling of the Hasidic fable “The Rooster Prince.” There, the young prince goes “mad”, takes off his clothes, hides naked under his parents’ table, crows like a rooster, and refuses to communicate verbally. Finally, a mysterious rabbi arrives, takes off all his clothes, gets under the table, and frightens the king and queen by crowing like a rooster. Maximum empathy.
The next morning, I stood in front of the crew and told them about my epiphany. My trembling voice immediately betrayed me. I started crying. Others in the room also cried. They had family members who suffered from mental illness. their own pain. I explained that my brother and Shia were looking for the same thing.
“Maximum empathy” for those who have been hurt and those who have hurt them.
This is a radical concept in today’s mental health culture, shaped by social media moralization and rampant shaming. We celebrate celebrities who open up about anxiety and depression. Don’t underestimate them. I have struggled with anxiety for years. But these situations are easy to criticize. Because most of them suffer behind closed doors. But what about something even dirtier? bipolar. Schizophrenia. Personality disorder. My brother runs naked through the streets of a foreign city. Or maybe Kanye will reveal it on Twitter. Well, it’s not that convenient for us.
The story of bipolar disorder is ironically the perfect medicine for today’s world. Because the sick internet culture we’re all drowning in is currently incapable of holding two contradictory truths at the same time. We are algorithmically isolated. Antiparadox by design. We have divided things so neatly that we have lost the essential confusion that is the human experience.
I’ve been thinking about this for the better part of the last decade. Still, I don’t have an answer. All I can say for sure is that I love my brother. A love so deep that it endured through mental illness, suicide, and the long journey it took to make this film. This basic human capacity for love gives me faith. So that someday we can overcome the distance between us. And if you can, start a conversation that taps into our collective “maximum empathy.”
I first showed a rough cut of the film to a friend in her mid-twenties who has a brother with bipolar disorder, but from what I gather she didn’t really connect with it. When the movie ended, he looked at me with snot dripping from his nose and his eyes red with tears and said, “I have to go call my brother.”
In February 2026, Shia LaBeouf was arrested during an altercation at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Last month, he pleaded guilty to three counts of simple assault and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years, and alcohol treatment. LaBeouf was ordered by a court to attend a rehab facility after being arrested in Georgia in 2017 for public intoxication and disorderly conduct while filming The Peanut Butter Falcon. In December 2020, FKA Twigs accused LaBeouf of sexual assault, 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 script, Kill Year Idols, won the Sundance Lab Comedy Fund in 2023. Josh is currently finishing post-production on his feature directorial debut titled Rooster Prince, a road trip drama about two brothers starring Shia LaBeouf, Jackson White and Melissa Leo, based on his experience losing his brother to bipolar disorder. Josh’s photography has also been exhibited in galleries around the world.
