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One of the reasons Pete Davidson's tumultuous 2018 was so surprising is that, well, we're not used to Pete Davidson being surprising. Even on Saturday Night Live, a show that delights in pushing its actors into ever-stranger scenarios, he tends to play variations on a type: the young slacker who meets all of life's complications with an indifferent shrug and an oblivious smile.

Naturally, Big Time Adolescencefinds him playing basically that character, yet again. This time, however, it's played with enough nuance to suggest there's more to Davidson than that schtick.

Davidson’s Zeke is that guy in every suburban hometown who was a bad-boy legend in high school, and then more or less stopped maturing right there. At 23, his best friend is 16-year-old Mo (Griffin Gluck of American Vandal), the kid brother of his childhood girlfriend.

Mo is bright and sweet and has a promising future ahead of him, or would if only he were able to see past Zeke and his eternally adolescent lifestyle. Mo may be past the days when he thought the drive-thru lady knowing Zeke’s name was the sickest thing ever, but he hasn’t yet moved on to the realization that getting recognized by the drive-thru lady is as good as Zeke might ever get.

Much of Big Time Adolescencefeels familiar, in ways good and bad. On the one hand, it adds to the intimacy. You know these guys, you recognize these rooms, you’ve been to their parties, you’ve lived their ennui, and it doesn’t take much doing to get you back into that headspace – particularly when director Jason Orley is so good at nailing the details, like the way Zeke and Mo puff up for each other when they’re around girls.

On the other, Big Time Adolescencefeels like a movie we’ve seen countless times before, and not even an opening scene that’s essentially a big-screen adaptation of the “record scratch” meme can shake up the formula. The film is often funny but rarely uproarious, kinda sweet but not terribly touching. The life lessons it ultimately imparts are perfectly reasonable, but they're also ones you’ve heard from your own nagging parents dozens of times before.

What does stand out is Zeke. The character aligns so closely with Davidson’s public persona that it’d be easy to assume he’s barely acting at all; he’s even got all the same tattoos that Davidson does. That’d be selling Davidson short, however. Zeke isn’t a particularly deep guy, but Davidson ensures he’s three-dimensional, coloring the edges of his performance with emotions like fear and regret that Zeke can’t even recognize in himself.

By movie’s end, Zeke’s still the kind of guy who considers himself a child and thinks that, if anything, it’s the 23-year-olds with jobs and apartments and grad school applications who are the weird ones. There's only so much that guy is ever going to change.

But Davidson? Zeke is proof that he’s maturing as an actor, and ready to take his next steps.

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