An oddly tender portrait of a loafer a young man
Pete Davidson delivers powerfully in slacker film
In The King of Staten Island, Pete Davidson plays Scott Carlin, a 24-year-old layabout who still lives with his mom, spends most of his time smoking weed and playing video games with his friends, and nurses a wildly misguided dream to open a place called Ruby Tat-Tuesdays, where customers can watch each other get inked while scarfing down their chicken fingers.
It’s a surpassingly yucky punchline in a movie that glories in the most ungainly aspects of fleshy human life.
But the source of Scott’s stagnation becomes clearer, as do the reasons for a personality that is alternately irritating, impulsive and self-centred. And what at first seems ugly and indulgent begins to take on weird beauty.
There are sequences when Scott and his buddies talking about nothing look like another version of the dude-centric hangout movies that director Judd Apatow has become famous for.
But here, Apatow — working from a script he co-wrote with Davidson and Dave Sirus — pumps the brakes on raunchy jokes and obvious sight gags, allowing the humour and pathos of Scott’s story to coexist in unforced, organic harmony.
The story occurs over the course of early autumn, when Scott’s sister, Claire (Maude Apatow), moves out to attend college and he is left with his mom, Margie (Marisa Tomei), an overworked nurse who tries repeatedly to connect with her son, only to be insensitively rebuffed. Over the course of this ambling, unhurried narrative, Scott gets a job, fends off the attentions of his would-be girlfriend (Bel Powley), and works up an irrational dislike for Ray, (Bill Burr), who works at a local firehouse.
Scott’s own father was a firefighter and lost his life 17 years earlier, while on the job. On its face, The King of Staten Island may look like a thwarted, entitled young man getting his act together, but it gains momentum to become a portrait of trauma and unresolved grief.
Davidson delivers a powerful central performance here, made all the more poignant for the movie’s autobiographical elements (his own father, also a firefighter, died on Sept. 11, 2001). But that real-world connection is never exploited or sentimentalized in the film, which is both irreverent and unexpectedly tender.
Perhaps the highest compliment one can pay Davidson, Apatow and their collaborators is that this is probably the first movie in cinematic history to earn every single one of the audience’s tears at the sight of a disastrous back tattoo.