137 min | R | June 12, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Scott Carlin is twenty-four and going nowhere on Staten Island. He smokes weed, gives terrible tattoos, and still grieves the firefighter father who died when he was a kid. Then his mother starts dating a firefighter, and the grief stops being theoretical.
Scott Carlin is twenty-four and lives in his mother’s basement on Staten Island. He has no job, no plan, and a half-baked dream of opening a tattoo restaurant. His father died fighting a fire when Scott was seven, and the loss has frozen him in place. Judd Apatow builds the film around the idea that arrested development is a form of mourning. The real subject is not a slacker who needs to grow up. It is a kid who stopped the clock the day his father died.
Pete Davidson plays Scott as a live wire who flinches at his own jokes. He pulls from his own life, and the rawness shows in the scenes where the comedy drops away. Marisa Tomei plays his mother Margie with a worn patience that finally cracks. Bill Burr plays Ray Bishop, the firefighter who starts dating Margie, and turns a stock antagonist into a defensive, decent man. Bel Powley plays Kelsey, the on-and-off girlfriend who wants more than Scott can give, and Maude Apatow plays his sister Claire as the sibling who already escaped. Steve Buscemi plays Papa, the firehouse veteran who sees the dead father in the living son.
Apatow directs in his loose, improvisational register and lets scenes run until the actors find something true. The script by Apatow, Davidson, and Dave Sirus mines the comedian’s biography for material that is funny and bruising in the same breath. The camera stays handheld and close, favoring long takes that give the performances room to wander. That patience is the film’s strength and its liability. The firehouse sequences in the back half find a warmth the early scenes only gesture at, but the structure sprawls and the comedy and the grief never fully settle into one register.
The King of Staten Island works best when it stops trying to be a comedy. The scenes between Scott and Ray carry a real charge because both men are guarding the same wound. Apatow trusts Davidson to hold the weight, and Davidson mostly does. The film is too long and too loose to land everything it reaches for. What survives is the honest portrait of a young man learning that you do not get over the dead. You make room for them.