It’s easy to be the king when not many people are vying for your dominion. In Scott Carlin’s (Pete Davidson) case, that would be Staten Island. And while everyone has a story about riding the Staten Island ferry, few have one about the borough itself, unless they took someone’s pizza enthusiast recommendation about Denino’s (where Scott will work as a bus boy in the movie). Yes, SI is the place, as he and his friends discuss, that still never managed to be gentrified with anything like the intensity of Brooklyn or Queens. But maybe it comes down to what Scott says early on in the movie, “If you’re rich, why would you live in Staten Island?” Unless, of course, one is part of the coterie that was featured on Mob Wives. Otherwise, like Scott, one is only there because he was born and raised (like Davidson himself, who chooses to chill in the basement of the home he owns with his mother). A Staten Islander through and through, with the fireman father to back it up (one can’t help but think of the Sex and the City episode “Where There’s Smoke…” when the quartet heads to SI for a “Calendar Contest” in support of the New York City Fire Department). Only his father, like Davidson’s own, died on the job when Scott (the tribute-paying name of Davidson’s dad) was just seven. Yes, the same age as Pete. In fact, the autobiographical nature of the film seems like part of the reason many otherwise difficult to capture interactions come across as more authentic than they would have with an entirely fiction-based screenplay.
Like all characters of the Judd Apatow (who co-wrote the script with Davidson and Dave Sirus) canon, Scott is fucked up. A “lovable” slacker who is lost, and just needs a push from someone or something in the right direction that will snap him out of his cocoon-like state of arrested development. We’re assured of this as we see him driving along the freeway at the beginning, high out of his mind to the point where closing his eyes for a prolonged period feels like a good idea. A perfectly reasonable decision. He opens them just in time to swerve out of the way and cause a collision between two other cars as Kid Cudi’s “Just What I Am” plays on his radio. Indeed, Kid Cudi will make everything come full-circle with the contrast of the song chosen for the final scene. A deliberate poetic conclusion that makes sense considering Davidson himself turned to the rapper for solace during his troubled youth–or, as he put it in a 2016 interview, the music of Kid Cudi saved his life. Which, one supposes, means Kanye West is roundaboutly responsible for Davidson’s mental health (ironic, innit?) since he signed Cudi to GOOD Music in ‘08. Cudi’s association with “stoner culture” (sort of an oxymoron) is in part what led him to quit smoking in 2013, despite the fact that much of his music was centered around the practice, and a reverence for it.
To that end, while there is no specific time period placed on The King of Staten Island, it suffers from the same symptoms as many films and TV shows in the wake of COVID-19, with no one sure just how to address something so dystopian quite yet. Preferring to remain in the time B.C. (Before Corona). In this instance, it feels like we could be in the 2012 era (minus the part where we know the series finale of Game of Thrones has already ended), when both Kid Cudi’s music was still new and things had a greater aura of simplicity to them. Hence, Scott’s ability to idle in his mom Margie’s (Marisa Tomei) basement all day with his other deadbeat friends, their only care in the world to remain as high as possible while selling drugs to others out of the window. Now and again, the scene is brightened when the more vivacious Kelsey (Bel Powley), who has been friends with Scott since their childhood, shows up. Occasionally, with another female friend to enliven the den of slack. During one of the initial scenes, said friend, Tara, is played by none other than Davidson’s ex, Carly Aquilino, whom he was seeing for a year before Cazzie David and Ariana Grande.
It is Tara who starts probing Davidson about one of his tattoos, signifying the death of his father. Laughing it off after Kelsey and Oscar (Ricky Velez) initially pretend it really upsets him, we see that, yes, of course it upsets him despite trying to chuckle along with the others. Signaling to Kelsey over Tara, Scott enlists a tacit code between them, after which we cut to his room where plenty of reference is made to his rumored-to-be-huge wang as Kelsey moans in ecstasy.
Afterward, Scott admits he didn’t cum, blaming the antidepressants, but also applauding them for improving his stamina. Scott’s tendency to make a joke out of everything that is sad, of course, perfectly suits Davidson’s own range, and how he built his career. And yet, The King of Staten Island imagines a sort of alternate universe in which Davidson never managed to parlay his neuroticism into a comedy routine. One in which he still does pretty much the same thing regardless, only with a way smaller paycheck for it.
Playing a twenty-four year old (at twenty-six) high school dropout with little desire for anything other than keeping his head above water amid the constant state of depression isn’t much of a stretch for Davidson. His younger overachieving sister, Claire (Maude Apatow), likely modeled on Davidson’s own younger sister, is the only “normal” one in the family. And the progeny that Margie is clearly most proud of is Claire for her ambition, while she struggles to find that same sentiment for a son whose directionlessness she knows she’s contributed to by being so enabling. So accommodating to his comfortable coma. When a romantic prospect in the form of Ray Bishop (Bill Burr) comes her way thanks to a fuck-up on Scott’s part, it sends the latter’s world into chaos as he grapples with the idea that maybe he won’t be allowed to live in the time-frozen environment of the basement forever (on a side note, Scott insists to Claire when she says he’s wasting his life that he smokes weed so time can slow down and he’ll have more of it to do something later on).
That Ray is a fireman like his father was doesn’t do anything to glorify the man in Scott’s eyes. Instead, it further enrages him about his mother’s choice as he yells at her that she ought to start building another shrine to Ray now, because he’s inevitably going to die. This tirade expands during a baseball game he reluctantly attends with Ray and his firefighter friends, including the chief, “Papa” (Steve Buscemi, himself a former firefighter who took up the role again when 9/11 happened to help an NYFD very much in need). Seething to him that firefighters shouldn’t be allowed to have children, we get the sense of genuine pain in Davidson’s soliloquy, knowing he must have repeated this to himself and others thousands of times over the years since he was seven, losing his father after he went into a collapsing building during the aftermath of 9/11.
Buscemi’s addition to the movie roughly halfway through is one of the things that both enriches it, and lends a sort of meta flair. For Buscemi, once upon a time, was a more rough-hewn version (as all men pre-dating millennials tend to be) of Davidson, growing up in Valley Stream, Long Island, a wasteland not unsimilar to Staten that eventually inspired Buscemi to write, direct and star in 1996’s Trees Lounge. A film that also seems to imagine an alternate universe in which Buscemi never “made it” out of Valley Stream, instead becoming just another pathetic barfly/townie. That Buscemi had to pass a civil service test in the late 70s in order to become a firefighter also draws parallels to Kelsey, who is studying for hers so that she can get involved in city planning and make everyone see Staten Island the way she does: a great place to live, rather than a great place to leave.
Her growing frustrations with Scott as she tries to school him in how to be not even an adequate faux boyfriend, but just a decent human being reach a crescendo at a certain point, prompting her to cut off sex with him even though she still cares for him deeply. In a way that he can’t admit to reciprocating, lest he become vulnerable. And we all know vulnerability opens one up to loss. He already learned that lesson with his father. Thus, Scott prefers minimal to no feelings at all. The perfect king for an island as blasé and emotionally devoid as the one he lives on (both figuratively in his mind and literally in Staten). Naturally, by the time the movie draws to a semi-conclusion, John Donne silently emerges to prove, once again, that no man is an island, even if he inhabits one.
