Crowning achievement
Pete Davidson reigns in ‘King of Staten Island’
Judd Apatow’s latest brings together all the director’s basics: crude humor, foul language, excessive weed usage played for laughs, friendship and family-based sentimentality. It adds two other Apatow essentials — a protagonist whose charisma might be deemed dubious and an Apatow family member in the cast.
In the past, Apatow has bet on such actors as Steve Carell (“40-Year-Old Virgin”), Seth Rogen (“Knocked Up”), Adam Sandler (“Funny People”) and Amy Schumer (“Trainwreck”), who in some cases co-wrote the screenplays or in Schumer’s case was sole writer. In this case, Apatow wagers on lead actor and cowriter Pete Davidson of “SNL” fame, whose charm might be up for debate for many viewers.
Dedicated to Davidson’s late New York City fireman father, “The King of Staten Island” tells the story of Scott Carlin (Davidson), a screw-up suicidally traumatized by the death of his father, with ADHD, no selfrespect, a serious weed addiction and in fact fondness for almost anything mind-altering.
Scott, 24, is an aspiring tattoo artist covered in tats, which seem to be his version of cutting. He dresses in T-shirts, shorts and sandals and lives in Staten Island with his mother, Margie (an endearing Marisa Tomei), an ER nurse. His fellow outcast friends include the very short Igor (Moises Arias), the troubled Oscar (Ricky Velez) and the large and very stoned Richie (Lou Wilson).
Scott has sex with his friend Kelsey (Bel Powley, another asset). She has feelings for him. But he does not think of himself as her boyfriend because he is too screwed up, and he has a point.
In the opening, the big crisis is whether or not Scott will attend the high school graduation party of his college-bound sister, Claire (a charming Maude Apatow, who thankfully looks more like her mother). Little sister Claire has spent her life worrying about what big brother
Scott will do next and has tried to take care of him.
At the same time, Margie meets, in not-so-cute fashion, divorced fireman with punchable face and Red Sox fan Ray Bishop (Canton’s talented Bill Burr), and after 17 years of abstaining has a torrid affair with him and tells Scott, who has dreams of starting a “tattoo restaurant,” where you can eat while getting inked, that he must move out.
You might think this would send Scott into an Oedipal spiral. He gets high with Ray’s ex (secret ingredient Pamela Adlon), and, against even his better judgment, he agrees to break into a neighborhood pharmacy.
Davidson brings an edge and a darkness to Scott’s disagreeableness that make it hard to like him much, if at all, for the first half of this 137-minute comedy. Then, when Apatow piles on the Capra-corn in the last 45 minutes, mostly in the form of Scott bonding with Ray’s (and Scott’s late dad’s) firemen pals, including Steve Buscemi, you may feel manipulated, and you were.
Manhattan shimmers like a silvery Oz in the distance in a scene in this Staten Island-shot film.
“The King of Staten Island” may not be regal, but eventually you warm up to the royal pain in the butt at its predictably soft center. But I did not melt.
(“The King of Staten Island” contains drug use, profanity, sexually suggestive scenes and more drug use.)