The King of Comedy

Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) can’t get started. He’s a thirty-four-year-old who dreams of a standup slot on the late-night talk show hosted by Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). Living and practicing in the basement of his mother’s New Jersey house, Rupert works as a messenger and boasts of his future glory to anyone who’ll listen. When his efforts to get Jerry’s attention fail, he teams up with the ferocious Masha (Sandra Bernhard), another of Jerry’s stalkers, and they take matters into their own hands. This plot sparks Martin Scorsese’s cruelly lucid, agonizingly sympathetic riff, from 1982, on the immature idiot and the public artist whose lives are equally warped by fame. The isolated Rupert is as much of a slick glad-hander as any Las Vegas headliner, and Jerry, oppressed by a media machine of his own making, is forced into pristine isolation. Scorsese infuses this tale with the passionate energy of New York street life and wonder at the powerful workings of show business and studio craft. Yet his main subject is the ineffable factor of genius, which Jerry has, Rupert lacks, and no desire or effort can replace. It suggests the director’s own terrified there-but-for-the-grace-of-God self-portrait.(Museum of the Moving Image; Feb. 3 and Feb. 5)