There are great filmmakers, and then there is Martin Scorsese, the only artist living or dead who can credibly claim to have directed the best American movie, or nearly so, in each of six consecutive decades: “Taxi Driver” (1970s), “Raging Bull” (‘80s), “Goodfellas” (‘90s), “The Departed” (2000s), “The Wolf of Wall Street” (‘10s) and “Killers of the Flower Moon” (‘20s).
Maybe I’m reaching. But people with gut reactions to that list have surely devoured “Mr. Scorsese,” a new five-part documentary series available on the Apple TV+ platform that offers an intimate glimpse at one of our culture’s foremost creative minds.
Directed by Rebecca Miller, “Mr. Scorsese” covers the well-known highlights while candidly assessing the failures separating them. For every classic in Scorsese’s filmography, there are a couple of misfires that still tell an important part of his story, and that of the country that produced him.
Even after he’d directed 1980’s “Raging Bull,” a brutal but masterful boxing film that won his frequent collaborator Robert DeNiro a lead-acting Oscar, Scorsese still had to prove himself. He re-teamed with DeNiro two years later for “The King of Comedy,” a satire of American celebrity culture that was overlooked in 1984 but has aged into a classic.
This is not a consensus opinion. “The King of Comedy” bombed with audiences and earned mixed reviews. Nobody mentions it in the same breath as his classics, or even second-shelf work such as “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “Casino,” “Gangs of New York” or “The Irishman” (pretty good director if that’s his B-tier).
But despite its lack of formal inventiveness — not every Scorsese movie can rewrite the language of cinema, after all — “The King of Comedy” speaks across the decades like few films of its era, offering a chilling warning about where our society was headed.
It takes the troubled-loner concept from “Taxi Driver” to darker, if less violent, extreme. DeNiro stars as Rupert Pupkin, an unbalanced loser who is obsessed with the late-night talk show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). He dreams of appearing on the show, befriending Jerry and scaling the heights of show business despite having no experience as a performer.
He’s rejected repeatedly by Langford and his team. Rather than put in the work of building a reputation as a standup comic, Pupkin concocts a plan to get famous anyway. With the help of a woman who also stalks Langford (Sandra Bernhard), he kidnaps the host and demands that he be allowed to perform on the show in exchange for his release.
The tight, suspenseful film ends with Pupkin getting not his comeuppance, but validation beyond his dreams. He performs on the show and does a decent five minutes of well-received material. Once the story gets out, he is of course arrested, but he also becomes a media sensation, with a book deal and an eager audience waiting after he gets out of jail.
Viewers didn’t buy it at the time, but a version of this film released today wouldn’t be far-fetched at all. Pupkin’s fanaticism mostly qualifies as now-ordinary “stan” behavior, and the mechanisms that turned him into a star have only become more normalized in the decades since.
Apart from the physical abduction, Pupkin’s deranged, parasocial fantasy life seems like a typical workday for your average Twitch streamer, Youtube personality or comment-section troll.
“The King of Comedy,” an obvious reference point for 2019’s “Joker,” would probably be a hit today, with a good portion of the audience cheering Rupert on while trying to find its own side door into a world of fame and riches.
But in 1982, the film did so badly at the box office that Scorsese had to direct two conventional projects in the mid-’80s — “After Hours” and “The Color of Money” — to prove he was still a safe studio investment.
With his credibility reestablished, he moved on to grander visions of spirituality, American history, capitalist decadence, mythic violence and imperial collapse. But “The King of Comedy,” the film that nearly cost him his career, is the only time Martin Scorsese showed us our future.