106 min | R | April 21, 2023 | Roadside Attractions
Ray Romano plays a Queens tile contractor whose whole identity rests on his son’s college basketball scholarship. Then the kid gets dumped and stops shooting. Turns out the father needs the dream more than the son ever did.
Leo Russo is a tile contractor in Queens who works for the family business and lives inside his father’s shadow. His son Matthew earns the nickname “Sticks” on the basketball court and draws interest from college recruiters. That scholarship becomes the thing Leo points to as proof his life amounts to something. When Matthew’s girlfriend breaks up with him and the boy falls apart, Leo intervenes in ways that expose his own desperation. The film is about a man who confuses his child’s future with his own redemption.
Ray Romano plays Leo as a soft man who has spent decades being talked over by louder people. He hunches at family dinners and swallows insults from his father and brother. Romano lets the panic surface slowly as Leo starts manipulating the people around his son. Laurie Metcalf plays Angela, Leo’s wife, who is recovering from cancer and watching her husband make terrible decisions. Metcalf builds a woman who sees Leo clearly and loves him anyway, and her stillness anchors every scene she shares with him. Jacob Ward plays Matthew with a recessive quietness that makes the boy’s reluctance feel like a real condition rather than a plot device.
Romano directs his first feature from a script he wrote with Mark Stegemann, and he shoots the Russo family at full volume. The dinner-table scenes pack the frame with relatives who talk over each other in overlapping bursts, and the camera stays close enough to feel the crowding. The Queens locations carry weight without becoming postcards, the kitchens and basement workshops worn down by use. The film slows when it follows Leo alone, the soundtrack dropping out so his decisions land in silence. Romano trusts the contrast between the noise of the family and the quiet of his own bad judgment.
This is a small film about an ordinary man making a mess of love. Leo wants his son to escape a life that Leo himself never questioned, and he cannot tell the difference between helping the boy and using him. The film keeps the stakes domestic and refuses to inflate them. Romano stays in territory he knows, the Italian-American family and its suffocating affection, and he finds something honest in how a decent man can do indecent things while convinced he is being generous.