Pete Davidson is like a really good but rare condiment. Say, wasabi mustard or sun-dried tomato pesto. You know it’s good, but what exactly does it go with? Chicken? Fish? Toast? You know you like wasabi mustard, but would you really sprinkle it on to your tuna sandwich?
Davidson has consistently been one of the funniest cast members on the past six seasons of Saturday Night Live, but most of his greatest moments have come during “Weekend Update” monologues and the occasional digital short. SNL has been unable to figure out what to do with him during the rest of the show. He is not only a very talented comedian but also, as seen from his work in Trainwreck, a much better actor than he is usually given credit for. All he needed was a chef — er, director — who knows how to properly use him, what he goes well with and what he doesn’t, and how to bring out his full potential as an actor.
Enter Judd Apatow, writer and director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and other standards of the raunchy comedy canon. In The King of Staten Island, now streaming on Amazon, Apple TV, and other platforms, Apatow has managed to bring out a side of Davidson that we have rarely seen before. Davidson, for his part, has given us a performance that will have many SNL viewers wondering why the show’s writers continually bury him at the back of the bench.
The King of Staten Island is co-written by Apatow, Davidson, and Dave Sirius. It is a very personal, autobiographical story for Davidson — the film is dedicated to his father, Scott Davidson, a firefighter who lost his life on 9/11. And it is set in Staten Island, where Davidson was born, raised, and where he still makes his home. In the film, he assumes his father’s name but plays a version of himself — a little lost, perhaps even a little crazy, but never for a single moment unlikable.
Scott (Davidson) is a mid-twenties lost boy who doesn’t do much other than sit around the house watching SpongeBob Squarepants and getting high. He has a modicum of artistic talent, but he dropped out of art school because of his problems concentrating. He lives with his mother (a typically excellent Marisa Tomei), an ER nurse, and his younger sister (Maude Apatow, Judd Apatow’s daughter). His father was a firefighter who died fighting a hotel fire when Scott was seven, and we get the sense that among Scott’s problems is his repressed, unprocessed sadness over the loss of his father.
Scott is self-deprecating to a fault. He tells his on-again, off-again girlfriend that she deserves someone better than him. “You’re a good guy! I like you!” she replies. He doubles down: “Based on what?” His younger sister worries about him constantly. Before she goes off to college, she implores him to get his life together. “Time is passing by very quickly!” she warns him. “That’s why I smoke weed,” he retorts. “It slows it all down.” His dream is to become a tattoo artist, but his early experiments on his friends’ bodies didn’t turn out too well. A tattoo of what was supposed to be Obama on his friend’s left arm looks more like a human face crossed with an amoeba. A family friend gives him a job as a busboy at a restaurant, an unfulfilling job that nevertheless gives him a measure of stability. The story begins to accelerate when he finds out that his mother is dating another fireman.
Davidson’s winning performance is what will be remembered from The King of Staten Island. But in some ways, the true star of this film is the comedian Bill Burr. Also playing a version of himself — Ray Bishop, a firefighter and die-hard Red Sox fan from Boston — Burr enters the movie like a rocket blazing through the stratosphere, steaming and seething after Scott tattoos a line on his 9-year-old son’s arm. Ray wants Scott’s family to pay for the cost of getting the tattoo removed, and when he confronts Scott and his mother at their home, he’s fuming — until, that is, he realizes that Margie is a widow and available. “I know we had a little bit of a difference there,” he says to her later on a coffee date, in what might be the understatement of the decade, “but he’s a good kid. If the worst he’s doing is a couple of unlawful tattoos, you’ve done a good job.”
The first twist comes when, after Ray and Margie end up in a relationship, Margie kicks Scott out of the house. Soon after, a second twist involving Ray and Scott takes the story in an unexpected and heartfelt direction, which requires that Scott finally reckon with the memory and legacy of his father.
The story is engrossing; it holds your interest for every one of its 136 minutes. Steve Buscemi enlivens the proceedings further as a firefighter in Ray’s ladder company. The chemistry between Burr and Davidson is particularly good — they seem as if they’ve been acting together for years. And, unsurprisingly for a Judd Apatow movie, the writing is excellent. I would’ve loved to have seen this movie in a New York City theater to hear the crowd’s reactions to lines like, “If you have money, why would you ever live in Staten Island? … We’re like the only place that New Jersey looks down on.”
The King of Staten Island, like the superb Funny People (2009), shows that Apatow is capable of using comedic means for poignant, personal ends. No longer content with just getting laughs for the sake of laughs, Apatow is interested in examining the complexities of human relationships through edgy, problematic characters such as Scott. This new direction is allowing Apatow to grow into a more interesting (yet never unfunny) writer and director, much as Davidson’s performance in this film is a major statement about his capabilities as an actor. Continue to pair him with other top-notch performers such as Tomei, Buscemi, and Burr, and more and more movie-lovers will be saying, “Yes, another dollop of that wasabi mustard, please.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer from western Massachusetts and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the novel A Single Life and the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
