“When you’re causing them a problem, you are immediately separated from the people going in and placed with the people causing the problem.”

Anthony’s rating: A must-see for true film fanatics

Anthony’s review: No one alive can deny legendary filmmaker Martin Scorcese’s mastery of filming and telling a good story. At the start of his career, he showed an even bigger knack for spotting a good tale, sometimes in the most mundane of places right under everyone’s nose. This includes his short film Italian American, in which the subjects are his own parents, or The Last Waltz, which is arguably the greatest concert film NOT meant for Swifties. And in such projects Scorcese shows his greatest of strengths: Letting the story tell itself.

However, the most compelling of those slice-of-life films in his curriculum centred on a complete unknown, someone whose gateway for being the main subject (unknowingly too, it seems) is that he used to provide Marty with… substances. And was allegedly his bodyguard for a while, despite the fact that he could pass as DJ Qualls’ coat hanger. This is the guy who provided security and protection to the dude who wrote and directed Mean Streets. It doesn’t really matter if that’s true or not, because it’s a compelling tale. And Steven Prince is a fascinating raconteur of his own.

So American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince is a documentary of sorts. All the director does really is point his cameras at his friend and gently nudge him to talk about his life’s journey. After all, we ALL know a Steven Prince. We all have one of those in our entourage, in our extended family, in the break room at work or in the middle house of the street you live on. He’s the guy who effortlessly commands attention through a veritable pantomime of narrating something captivating that happened to him, and he doesn’t need any sort of visual aid because his sheer passion for his own story transports you body and soul to the very kingdom of magic he’s weaving.

That is, until a peculiar feeling occurs which takes you out of the spell long enough to realize something might be wrong or suggests that the chronicler’s perspective might be missing one vital aspect: his own disposition. Prince is unsurprisingly candid about his personal shortcomings, admits his own failings like a severe addiction that cost him his dream job, and embraces self criticism like he’s a Canadian stand-up jokester. But even then, it’s clear there’s more to it, shadows of a darkness taking hold so strongly that his only relief from it is to clown around at full tilt all the time.

As American Boy progresses and the yarns Prince spins become stranger, I became vividly reminded of Robin Williams cracking jokes impossible not to burst out a laugh at — but if you manage not to you can spot terrible pain hiding in his smile and eyes. And what was a good time with a clown becomes awkward… then downright uncomfortable. Like the point where Prince produces a revolver, points it to his surrounding friends and re-enacts a story where he was on the other end of the barrel. All of a sudden Steven Prince isn’t a fun times guy, but someone who needs help, and no one around him seems to know that or how to give it to him.

As he always does, Scorcese manages to present us an incredibly riveting, engaging story that turns out to be a sort of black mirror, an invitation to watch your own self or at least take the time to ponder if the story he’s telling could be yours at the bottom of it all. And if it is, what would YOU do about it? Would you even be able to acknowledge it? The filmmaker’s aim is never to humiliate or embarrass his leading man, but to through him deconstruct the very dread an entire nation lived in at that specific moment in time. And eerily enough, seems predict the rise, decades later, of social media influencers (auto-correct just warned me that “influencer” is not an accepted word, let that sink in).

Whether he creeps you out or amuses you, Steven Prince and the documentary about him did inspire an entire generation of filmmakers, some of whom tried to re-create, 30 years later, the same experience with a now-aged, if not matured, Steven Prince, in the short doc American Prince. The result of course is a pale comparison that achieves little more than a feeling of nostalgia. The man can still tell a good story, but the deer-in-the-headlights feeling he used to leave you with seems to have stayed back within the grimes of the ’70s, or least never left the confines of a Scorcese masterpiece.

Some filmmakers, however, used a more direct kind of inspiration from him, one of them going as far as lifting an entire tale told by Prince in the film, word for word, for a segment of a later movie whose popularity dwarfs this one’s. I won’t spoil it for you, except to say it involves an overdose and a giant needle.

Suffice it to say, if you didn’t know that story was plagiarized, it’s simply because American Boy is the very definition of a cult film. It was never officially released in theatres other than in the festivals circuit, but bootleg copies somehow started circulating among the filmmaking community soon after and made it a sensation with aficionados. This created an underground viral hit decades before that was even a thing.

If you fancy yourself a the very audience a website like ours targets, that of a community of cult film lovers, and never had the chance to view this one, you owe it to yourself, to Marty, to all his movies, to take the time and watch this fascinating journey into the hyperactive life of a man born to tell stories about himself.