It’s Kieran Culkin’s world, if he wants it to be

As awards-season fodder goes, I was largely unimpressed by A Real Pain, which I got a chance to see this past weekend.

Jesse Eisenberg directed, wrote, and starred in the film, and there’s enough that’s interesting about it to be encouraged about him working behind the camera for years to come. Career trajectories aside, though, this is a film that merely plays footsie with some very interesting themes like how trauma is passed down through generations and what survivors, and survivors’ progeny, ought to do as they carry on.

A Real Pain never really sticks with any of these ideas - it never bores deeply in to them, though they are right there - and so it ends up being noteworthy as a first acid test for Kieran Culkin after his tremendous run as Roman Roy on the HBO TV series Succession.

In that regard, at least, it is a smashing success. Given a character who is equal parts depressed and charismatic, who is prone to wild and rapid mood swings, Culkin absolutely takes over the movie. Much of that is by design, and is a credit to Eisenberg, a big star in his own right, for convincing Culkin to be his counterpart.

Culkin’s character, Benji, is supposed to drown out his cousin David, who is played by Eisenberg. The tension between the two of them is central to the themes the film toys with unconvincingly, and there is more than a little bit of Roman Roy and his uniformly less lovable Roy siblings being played upon here. In the end, it almost feels too successful at establishing that dynamic. The film hums when Benji is doing pretty much anything. You laugh and light up when he is friendly and become alarmed and concerned when he is sullen or angry, and this isn’t because Culkin is overbearing or going too big. It’s because A Real Pain doesn’t have enough to say when Benji himself isn’t talking, and Benji is depressed and doesn’t know what he wants out life!

Anyway, Kieran Culkin has been doing this acting thing for a long time, but this still felt like a big moment - a bridge to a new era of his career. He’s been a child star, a brooding youth, and a standout in one of the best ensemble casts on television in the last decade or so. Now we have proof that he can carry a big-ish movie in middle age.

As frustrating as film as A Real Pain is in toto, it also makes perfectly clear that Culkin can do pretty much anything he wants with his post-Succession career and it will be worth monitoring. That’s not always a slam dunk for actors coming off of an iconic role in a beloved TV show. Television seems more prone to generating an unshakable attachment to certain characters than film, and Succession is certainly in that category.

So, it’s Culkin’s world. I am hoping he’ll do more, but it’d be hard to begrudge him if he follows through on what he says in this recent interview with The New York Times.

Culkin is just a year older than me, seems devoted to his family, and, of course, got a close-up view of the wreckage that fame can cause from his brother. He might be a budding superstar, but I suspect he’ll be more of a welcome, but slightly too fleeting presence on screen going forward.