‘The King Of Staten Island’ Proves That Judd Apatow Hasn’t Meaningfully Evolved As A Filmmaker — But That’s Not Necessarily A Bad Thing

We last saw Judd Apatow (onscreen, that is, in an official capacity) in 2017, when he made an unexpected and uncredited cameo in The Disaster Artist, the behind-the-scenes dramatization of midnight movie classic The Room‘s making. Weirdo Hollywood wannabe Tommy Wiseau spots Apatow at a crowded restaurant and recognizes him as a power producer. He goes over to his table and starts shrieking sides from Shakespeare, only for Apatow to feed him some bitter medicine about his bleak future in showbiz if he continues like this. It’s a brief but significant scene, if only for how it suggests that this is how the public has come to see Apatow as of late: as something closer to an industry steward than an artist, more frequently the dispenser of big breaks than the talent himself.

He’s now returned to the director’s chair for the first time in five years to bestow one such break on Pete Davidson, who has reached a midpoint of fame at which his continued presence on Saturday Night Live feels like it’s penning him in, and yet his name eludes the nation’s grandparents and the less-plugged-in. That could change with The King of Staten Island, Davidson’s proper entrée to the ranks of bona fide Movie Stars, the Billy Madison testing his viability at the box-office for the average American moviegoer. That metric will now have to be figurative, with pandemic measures forcing the film onto a digital release, and yet it still arrives with a certain sense of ceremoniousness — not as a fledgling A-lister’s big moment, but as the resurgence of Apatow the Director, with all his charms and peccadillos intact.

A cursory scan of Apatow’s C.V. over the past decade paints a picture of a man who’s had better luck when coordinating other people’s work than when setting out on his own. In recent years, he’s facilitated the greatest comedy spoof of our time (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) and the kind of crowd-pleasing, ticket-selling, Oscar-nomination-earning romantic comedy that doesn’t really get made anymore (The Big Sick). He’s helped out friends like Pete Holmes and Lena Dunham with writing and directing gigs on their respective TV series Crashing and Girls, and got in the small-screen game himself with Netflix’s tepidly received Love.

As the main creative mind responsible for feature-length films, however, he’s been on the outs. He took a swing in 2012 with This Is 40, which he somewhat infamously characterized as his Cassavetes movie while on the press trail that year. That was his way of announcing that he had made a dialogue-driven movie about the difficulties of marriage, a departure from his usual schtick of “twenty-to-thirty-something guy finally shakes off his arrested development and comes of age with help of his buddies.” Detractors wrinkled their noses at the film’s misanthropic view of family life and middle age, and they weren’t much kinder to Trainwreck three years later. Apatow’s effort to build a new wing on his wheelhouse — gender-flipping the getting-your-shit-together narrative by inserting Amy Schumer, and fitting it all into a more conventional rom-com format — saw handsome fiscal returns, while lacking the glow of his best productions.

From the first hang sesh between Davidson’s rudderless tattoo artist Scott and his coterie of dirtbag pals, it’s clear that The King of Staten Island gets most of its DNA from Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Apatow’s never better than when he lets his actors settle into the loose, improvisational rapport that naturally develops when you’re sitting around smoking weed with friends. That’s the long and short of how Scott would like to spend his life, supplementing all the chilling with a bit of codependent care for his mother (Marisa Tomei) and the occasional dalliance with his not-girlfriend Kelsey (Bel Powley). In this instance, we even get the psychological impetus for his inability to grow up, an overall psychological turmoil that compels Scott to consider suicide in the film’s opening minute. Just as Davidson’s real father died serving as a firefighter on 9/11, so too has Scott lost his dad to an inferno (just some blaze, with less political baggage).

“Judd Apatow’s never better than when he lets his actors settle into the loose, improvisational rapport that naturally develops when you’re sitting around smoking weed with friends.”

This arc supplies comfortable, familiar scaffolding on which Apatow can mount the riff-friendly strain of comedy he’s always favored. It’s not for nothing that Staten Island is Apatow’s funniest movie since the underrated Funny People, which just so happens to be the last time he attempted this roman à clef treatment of a known stand-up star‘s life. Davidson can affect a natural back-and-forth with everyone in his character’s orbit, whether that’s the hooligan child Scott befriends as a canvas for practicing his tattoo skills, or the kid’s irate father (Bill Burr) and soon-to-be boyfriend of Scott’s mom. As Scott, Davidson’s easily inserted into the classically Apatovian detours that extend the run times of the director’s movies well past the two-hour mark; an out-of-nowhere fight club sequence at Scott’s restaurant day job and an unexpected cameo from Action Bronson as a mortally wounded man stand out as two highlights.

But these scenes, hilarious yet inessential, rub many the wrong way; instead of being allowed to pad an overlong film, they should be deserving casualties of the editing suite. Those objecting to Apatow’s tendency toward open-endedness will find nothing has changed on that front, a remarkable consistency that also extends past his techniques and into his social politics. His features have always reinforced a somewhat conservative worldview in which all protagonists must be guided toward the righteous and correct path of eschewing sexual and chemical vices to settle down with a nice life partner. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve Carell’s punching of the V-card doesn’t open him up to a universe of erotic possibility, just commitment to sweet and age-appropriate Catherine Keener. Knocked Up tracks an unconventional family unit’s struggle to attain conventionality, and Trainwreck links a friendly doctor’s romantic advances with a more holistic betterment of the self for one mess of a woman.

Scott’s journey reproduces this ideology, taking Apatow back through well-charted territory he has no trouble traversing. By the end of the film, Scott will have wisely distanced himself from his friends’ botched pharmacy robbery, accepted his father’s death, and given Kelsey a real entryway to his heart. Though this transformation may seem obvious and inevitable to a given viewer, especially after having seen a few movies in this vein, this is presumably a great revelation to comedy types approaching thirty. The great work of any Apatovian hero is to Stop Messing Around and Get Serious, with Scott’s up-and-coming tattooing career an easy analogue for Davidson’s realization that he could go far if he really dedicated himself to performing. It’s all of a piece with Becoming A Man, which mainly entails providing for the loved ones depending on you.

Apatow hasn’t evolved in any meaningful respect, but any artistic stagnation — or regression — has been positive and productive. The kinder term would be that the director’s gone “back to basics,” readopting the elements of his style that made him one of the dominant architects of pop culture through the ’00s. Studio comedy is now littered with knockoff Apatows, entrusting lesser crews of ad-libbers with more freedom to dire results. The genuine article knows how to make this method work, and only by doing it his way. There’s a tasty little irony buried somewhere deep in here, that a filmmaker so rigidly devoted to guiding his characters through personal change would excel by resisting it himself.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

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