Once high school is over, there are a lot of decisions to be made about the future. Not every 17-year-old flourishes beyond that — making someone choose the path in life they want to go on is already an egregious task to give someone so young. However, some take a permanent vacation from all of that post K-12, opting to live vicariously, with no expectations of themselves nor any of life’s responsibilities.
Pete Davidson plays such a burnout in “Big Time Adolescence.” His Zeke has built a friendship with, of all people, his ex-girlfriend’s 16-year-old brother, Mo (Griffin Gluck). As happens at that age, hormones run wild, and you feel invincible to life’s hardships, but having Zeke as a mentor doesn’t stabilize it. After all, Zeke is what you would qualify as a “loser,” permanently guiding Mo’s life into oblivion by drinking, smoking weed, playing video games, and misguidedly (to be kind) convincing his 16-year-old bud to get “Tongue Daddy” tattooed on his chest.
Zeke is a strange breed. He has a loving dad (Jon Cryer), but has kept none of his high school friends, which is why he unhealthily spends his days hanging around with a 16-year-old. Shit hits the fan further when Zeke convinces Mo to start dealing drugs at local high school parties which, if you know high school, gets Mo the kind of newfound confidence he was craving all these years; girls are more attracted to him and seniors want to be his friend, but this is high school politics, and there is no more mundane or artificial time in one’s life than vying to be accepted by a bunch of idiot high schoolers, as the viewer sees through the timeline that the movie sets. It’s quite obvious that the childishness will eventually have to end, and that Mo, with life very much ahead of him, will have to realize that, unlike his silly mentor, he will have to grow up.
Director Jason Orley, who makes his directorial debut with the comedy, is smart enough to let the inherent likeability of Davidson’s talents take over his film. Davidson, an SNL veteran by now, has never fully succeeded on the big screen as an actor — what else would you call the gay character he played in “Set it Up” as anything other than misguided and offensive? If anything, “Big Time Adolescence” feels like the right next step for the comedian, who will next be seen in Judd Apatow’s much-more autobiographical “King of Staten Island.”
One can see why Apatow would want Davidson to star in the upcoming semi-autobiographical film. The 26-year-old tattooed-to-the-brink actor is charming enough to have us continue watching, what is essentially, a car-crash-waiting-to-happen in “Big Time Adolescence.”
Orley, smartly, never glorifies Zeke’s way of life either. If anything, the only grounded and moral center seems to reside in Cryer’s character, a loving father who also knows all-too-well that his 23-year-old son is going down the wrong path in life. Eventually, when Zeke and Mo’s unity ends up crashing and burning, the film takes an obvious turn for moral lessons and predictability. However, Davidson fans the fires, for the most part, by sticking true to his character and never defying the humanism which could have easily led to caricature with any other actor. The script may let him down more than a few times, but Davidson proves that he’s talented enough to carry his own movie.
“Big Time Adolescence” premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and opens on March 13, 2020.