Review: The King of Staten Island

This movie should have been called, "The Non-Graduate." That's what it is... a 2020 take on another era's Ben Braddock. There is no Mrs. Robinson, because the faux stability of the suburban household is long gone. The closest we get to that character is the ex of our hero's mother's romantic interest... who our hero doesn't sleep with, but through whom our hero gathers nasty intel on his assumed rival.

To extend the comparison, The Graduate focuses on a child of privilege who comes home from university to a malaise of comfortable inaction. Plastics. He acts out in the most violent way of which he is capable, having an affair with the wife of his parents' close couple-friends, all the while pining for the pure romance of her daughter.

None of this fits The King of Staten Island, because Pete Davidson's Scott Carlin is already destroyed at the start of the movie. His mother is a widow. He is already self-destructive. He, like Ben Braddock, has settled into the place where he is comfortabl…