“The King of Staten Island” (MA) *** and a half

THINK of filmmaker Judd Apatow, think of Hollywood-flavour comedy. 

Think of Pete Davidson, if you can – of the 29 credits against his name listing all his film and TV credits so far released, only eight are feature movies and, except in this case, his name doesn’t appear higher in the closing credits than fourth.

Apatow and Davidson are co-conspirators in writing this rather overlong (136 minutes including credits) examination of life in the bumpy lane in the New York borough of which repute says little favourable. 

Davidson plays 24-year-old Scott, unemployed, living with his mother Margie (Marisa Tomei) widowed when her firefighter husband died on 9/11, and his younger sister Claire (Maude Apatow). 

I’m happy to go along with wiser heads than I who suggest that this film is Davidson’s potted biography. 

Watching it as a whole and Scott in particular, I surprised myself by enjoying how it weaves clever, quick, intellectually undemanding one or two-line gags with uncomfortable relationship drama to deliver a story that comes close to credible. 

It’s family. It’s friendship. It’s life among the social bottom feeders of that heck of a town. It’s petty crime. It’s transient love between Scott and Kelsey (Bel Powley) who need to find solutions to burgeoning grown-upness beyond merely counting orgasms. 

The love that Margie and firefighter Ray (Bill Burr) find, lose and find again may look like a cliché but has to endure some tough barriers in the middle.

“The King of Staten Island” asks its audience to be patient. Its people battle with uncompromising reality on the way to a hopeful outcome. Mrs Grundy might walk away from every character, male, female, young, old, peppering their conversations with that word that you’re unlikely ever to see on this newspaper’s pages (I take some pride in having been the first person to use it in “The Canberra Times”). 

It’s as if America, in deploying its foremost cultural export, is revelling in a new-found freedom to use that punchy little word, with its myriad of grammatical opportunities. It’s juvenile, unnecessary but intellectually harmless, even socially comforting. And why not?

At Palace Electric and Dendy