For most of us, there are rites of passage as we go through our teenage years, working our way through the highs and lows of youth as we find our personal identity. There are countless moments that become formative, informing how we see the world and give us this fondness to look back on, making us see the preciousness. These stories have become crucial to the coming of age genre, glamorizing them as these moments when life was perfect, when we could do no wrong. Even if we were naïve, we were invulnerable to outside forces. Who wouldn’t want to remember those moments with a smile while drinking beer with your friends during a reunion?
While it’s fine to feel this way, to live in this sensation for the rest of your life is quite the opposite. For Zeke (Pete Davidson) in Big Time Adolescence (2020), he wanders through life as the screw-up, being seen as cool because of his ability to hotbox in a car while blaring DMX. He sells drugs and doesn’t have enough foresight to see why he should keep his job. This is the type of behavior that you’d tolerate from a 19-year-old. That is not Zeke. He is close to 30 and the only thing he has to show for himself is an impressive amount of ex-girlfriends.
The role of mentorship in youth is often as important as defining one’s own independence. That is why the choice to have Monroe (Griffin Gluck) spend most of the film under Zeke’s wing feels like the resource for comedy.
But this isn’t just some random pairing. The film opens in 2012 with Zeke and his girlfriend babysitting Monroe. As they walk out of a theater, Zeke claims that he could be an actor before forcing everyone to play-act like their dog just died. The exchange starts friendly but slowly begins to reveal how unwilling Zeke is to let the joke die. He wants to revel in this morbid joke, which perturbs his girlfriend. As the moment continues, Zeke is seen as cool because of the friends he hangs out with, introducing Monroe to the older kids who know how to drink and have a good time. You buy that Zeke is cool because he is the center of attention. Even if he’s a bad influence to a 10-year-old Monroe, it’s all playful.
Things jump ahead and Zeke is getting Monroe in trouble as his babysitter, pushing him around town. They don’t see their friendship as a transaction, but a chance to revel in youthful shenanigans. Monroe’s father (Jon Cryer) is concerned, disappointed that Zeke has been honking in his driveway every day for the past few years. It takes Monroe out of a stable routine, and you sense that he will end up like his friend Stacey (Thomas Barbusca), who is constantly on the verge of being arrested due to his excessive drug use and partying. Monroe at least has somewhat of a good head on him thanks to his parents, which makes the allure of Zeke far less appealing.
Zeke shouldn’t be a mentor, and yet Monroe’s father tries to, making their time together seem like a job. There is desperation to make Zeke see the value of his actions, but it’s all for naught. The noblest thing that Zeke does is takes the blame for a potential drug bust when Monroe is in a hot spot. He has nowhere to fall, and one can hope that he learns his lesson. By the end he has gotten another job, looking to at least have substantial work, but how will it be different this time? He opens the film at a job and midway through dealing with a customer, he leaves to get high. It’s not even like the exchange was over. The customer had a genuine, unanswered question and he leaves everything on a cliffhanger.
That is how Zeke sees life. If things get the slightest bit complicated, he bounces. While everyone seems to like him, there is this underlying sense that they more tolerate him because of other things he offers. They don’t have the heart to tell him to get a real job and act like an adult. He is someone who sees Jaws (1975) and decides to get a tattoo of Bruce the shark on a whim. He convinces Monroe to get a tattoo of “Tongue Daddy” while intoxicated because of a random inside joke. With this his father asks “Why would you put an inside joke on the outside of your body?”
For me, this is my first proper exposure to Pete Davidson the comedian. From all reports, this is the type of role that he plays all the time. I have to take them at their word because so much of this role feels too natural to have any depth. I don’t get the sense that there’s much to Zeke besides his ability to stare cluelessly at his problem and realize that he’s in a losing fight. While he has moments of levity that remind you why you hung out with him in high school, there is little sense why he’s still around. Even Monroe has outgrown him by the end, serving as more of a cautionary tale than a prominent model for adulthood.
Depending on how you look at the film, there’s an unsatisfying arc among the central figures of Zeke, Monroe, and Stacey. Stacey is the most like Zeke, almost idolizing him to the point that he tries to play off driving his weed-stenched car into a ditch as being his mother’s. Similarly, Zeke tries to make a notion that “boys will be boys” to the cops before being told that his antics aren’t hiding his own guilt.
Monroe meanwhile is fascinating as the centerpiece. Stacey is the cautionary tale if he bought into Zeke’s lifestyle. However, Big Time Adolescence’s appeal comes in how Monroe observes the immaturity around him, feeling like he is above it. It’s the moment where the juvenile behavior stops being fun. He’s gotten it out of his system, and now he’s forced to watch people who don’t know any better threaten to tear his life apart. It’s depressing, and in this moment of hell, Zeke begins to understand the basic concept of empathy.
On the flip side is Honey Boy (2019). While Big Time Adolescence only feels autobiographical thanks to Davidson’s too-convincing performance, there’s no escaping the parallels to reality in the Alma Har’el-directed movie. It’s pretty much sold as the film where Shia Lebouf plays a fictitious version of his father, looking back on a complicated youth as a child actor. Nowadays Lebouf is considered weird, coping with his personal life through art, and this is the piece de resistance of his entire career, a moment that everything has been building to in a quest to understand his pathos.
The story goes that he began to write Honey Boy following an arrest in 2017. During his recovery, he learned that he had PTSD and used the exercise as a chance to understand where this conflict came from. That is why the film is presented largely in flashback, with 22-year-old Otis (Lucas Hedges) sitting in rehab and thinking about his father from when he was 12 (Noah Jupe), existing on a film set. His father James (Lebouf) wasn’t the greatest, to begin with, having a small prison record and a drive that some could see as abuse. While he had his son’s best interest, it was one you’d more apply to a friend twice his age, giving him these adult vices that a child shouldn’t have to worry about.
While the film is ultimately an exploration of the father-son dynamic, it’s presented in such a way that it incorporates dream-like perspectives. The film opens with a shot of 22-year-old Otis on a film set, about to be blown back by an explosion. At first it’s presented as it would in a film before tearing apart the structure to find the humanity underneath. The symbolism of an explosion reflects how Lebouf likely felt in this scenario, being exposed to something disastrous from such close proximity that you don’t notice the damage until days later, if at all. Even as he’s jerry-rigged to a harness, the safety of the charade and falsity can’t keep it from lasting in his memory.
If you didn’t know that James was autobiographical, you’d still be questioning his status as a father figure. Could someone be that protective while neglecting someone of the childhood experience? Otis has to learn how to grow up without any formal structure, following scripts written by adults who are more about business formalities than sympathizing with a child’s needs. This is all presented in such a way that moments reveal pain and actions that made Otis self-destructive later in life.
Suddenly the picture begins to make sense, and it’s tragic to watch the revelation occur. As in Big Time Adolescence, Honey Boy builds to a moment of acceptance for their mentor as a flawed human being, whose self-destructive behavior has informed something of their identity. They both do not rid themselves of these bad influences, but find ways to appropriate them in smaller roles, knowing that there’s affection for them, but they need to move on beyond them.
Of course, Zeke is less off when Monroe leaves. He’s still getting high in a parking lot with an entry-level job. While it’s a step in the right direction, he’s still way behind where people should be at that point in their life. Similarly, James must learn to live with the knowledge that Otis now has some personal internal struggle that he’ll carry with him for the rest of his life. It’s more tragic because Otis doesn’t have advantages that Monroe does of having a parental figure with positive influence. He is left to become his own figure of authority, and as it’s later revealed that it doesn’t go well. He’s secretly carried pain inside of him.
We don’t see where Monroe ends up, but there’s the belief that he’ll be fine. His life returns to normal, even if he lives with some guilt that Zeke’s maturity is below his. For all of his problems, he did seem like a genuinely nice person.
Then there’s James, who has even more of a layer than anything that Big Time Adolescence has in store. This is Lebouf playing his father, already bringing some interpretation of how he sees him, trying to find this deeper understanding of why he behaved like he did. It adds something haunting, or an attempt to not only understand Otis' pain but also his father’s. The experiment really worked as a form of therapy and adds layers to the film’s reading. This is a personal exercise that is more than self-serving. You don’t need to follow Lebouf’s career to appreciate the nuance on display.
There is nothing wrong with Big Time Adolescence, but it lacks anything more interesting to say about stunted maturity. At most it’s a cautionary tale that we’ve seen before. We all know someone who is this much of a screw-up, and it’s funny to see him getting high and rapping to DMX. There are moments where you buy into Davidson as a personality, but he has little in the way of depth that makes you see him as more than your typical tragic comedy figure. This is your conventional indie story with clever twists, but there’s nothing fun or permanent about this. At most it’s something you’ll appreciate if Davidson’s career ever takes off (there’s still the Judd Apatow-directed The King of Staten Island (2020) this year, so… maybe).
When we look back at our youth, it’s full of these moments and figures that inform who we are. There are people that leave us with lessons, and it’s our job to figure out what they ultimately mean. In the best of circumstances, our mentors are figures that will be around to continue giving us guidance as we grow older. Though for some, they represent a different side of the coin, making us wonder what life could be if we don’t figure out how to fly right. As Honey Boy reveals, even if we do our best we can still have some trauma left inside, holding us back from reaching a greater potential. We have to come to terms with it, and it’s only then that anything will begin to make sense.
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