THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND
Movies On Demand, 3:00 a.m. ET
MOVIE PREMIERE: Judd Apatow, as comedian, producer and director, can be counted on to find and highlight the humanity and humor in even the most absurd of circumstances, and vice versa. Now here he comes, as one of the principal collaborators of a new comedy-drama character study starring Pete Davidson in a film drawing on his own life, and his own father’s death, for partial inspiration. Davidson became a star on NBC’s Saturday Night Live by playing a thinly veiled, highly vulnerable version of himself, talking of his drug use, his romantic ups and downs with famous celebrities, and even his erratic appearances on SNL itself. In The King of Staten Island, Davidson plays Scott, a 24-year-old still haunted by the sudden death of his firefighter father almost two decades before. Davidson’s screen persona, in his starring film debut, is self-deprecatingly sympathetic, a sort of Ringo in A Hard Day’s Night, but with more dialogue. And like any Apatow effort, it’s worth watching.