It is the final basketball game of the season for the Glendale Cougars – unless they win – and they are up against one of the best teams in the tri-state division.  Leo (Ray Romano) and Ange (Laurie Metcalf) join the packed auditorium to watch their son, Matthew (Jacob Warn) who puts up an impressive 22 points against the visiting team.  After the game, Leo is approached by a recruiter that gets him thinking about the potential in his son to go beyond a life of grunt labor at the family construction business as Leo has found himself in.  Matthew, however, is unsure of what he wants to do and Leo finds himself in a difficult position of wanting what is best for his son, while also letting him grow and make his own decisions. 

Ray Romano makes his feature writing and directing debut with Somewhere in Queens, a 106-minute coming-of-age comedy just as much for Warn’s Matthew as it is for Romano’s Leo.  Cowritten with Mark Stegemann, the film premiered at Tribeca in 2022 before receiving a theatrical rollout by Roadside Attractions.  The team takes a simple idea and justifies the run time by really focusing in on the contrasting dynamics not just between father and son – Matthew and Leo, as well as Leo his own father, Dominick (Tony Lo Bianco) – but also giving everyone in the extended Italian American family their own identities to develop and explore.  Most importantly, it does not feel like a simple retread of Romano’s long-running Everybody Loves Raymond (1996-2005), but rather a maturation of those topics of parenthood and family. 

While Somewhere in Queens is predominantly Leo’s story, there is a very important arc involving Matthew where Romano shows some incredible skill at breaking the camera away from him, especially given how much the dynamics of the film seem to be modeled off of his lived experience.  The camera instead finds its focus on Matther, and it leaves Warn with the difficult role as the shy and reserved voice at the boisterous Sunday dinner table. The young actor compliments the tone of the film perfectly, and given the surprise on the faces of his parents when they meet Dani (Sadie Stanley), his girlfriend of some time, shows us that Matthew is not one to be pushed around just because he is quiet and he has more going on in his life than initially imagined.  Warn does not allow the mellow role to push him to the sidelines of the frame, rather, he uses every chance the script allows him to act out on an emotion to capitalize on just how strongly Matthew experiences the world.  The smile and the light that he brings to the film when he is with Dani is infectious, but there is also a darker turn when he is feeling defeated and especially so when he is angry.  The script is surprisingly layered when it comes to Matthew and Warn does not shy away from the challenge of being the emotional barometer of the film. 

Romano is incredibly gracious to his entire cast in how the ensemble is managed and everyone is given their moment.  The humor is also incredibly kind to the family, while importantly never becoming too saccharine.  The few times someone is made out to be the butt of a joke, it is almost exclusively pointed toward Leo in order to humble him.  As mentioned, there is a noted maturity to the humor and the setups from his television days and it plays so much better on-screen given that the family unit – while they certainly frazzle each other – clearly do love each other at the end of the day.   

The real star of the show, though, is Metcalf as the matriarch of this Queens-based household.  As with Matthew, the role of the mother is fleshed out to be far more than just their position in the family unit, which is to say that Ange is a fully realized character with a backstory that informs her initial thorniness.  The cancer storyline she is given helps shape the performance while not defining it, which is an important distinction.  With her own dramatic plotline to contend with – in which she excels – she also fires at 100% when it comes to the comedy of the film.  She does fall a little victim to the amount of screentime she has, though, as every one of the characters is still playing into the tropes of New York and the Italian American family as seen on screen, so a disingenuous reading could call it a little one note, but a careful viewer will notice calculated motivation behind every barb she throws. 

For all the good the cast brings to their roles, there is one glaring and unavoidable note against the script, and it is the central conceit that Leo puts into motion about a third of the way through when he asks Dani to consider getting back together with Matthew after they had broken up, so he can focus on his tryouts.  There is no getting around the gross nature of this plot and the biggest dip in the humor is when Leo tries to play it off as a joke. It is as if Romano himself knows it is a bad idea and wants to move the script along quickly so that audiences do not get too hung up on the whole affair.  Unfortunately, it leaves behind a sour taste and holds the film back ever so slightly.  Had the rest of the film not been firing at such a consistently high caliber, this would have poisoned the entire experience, so it is still a testament to everything else that works in the film that it does not derail it entirely. 

Somewhere in Queens is a surprisingly solid debut for Romano that, at first glance, looks like just another simple family dramedy by a comedian who only ever plays themselves.  An anomaly in the current theatrical landscape, it was nice to see it given a rollout from Roadside even though it never quite captured the attention of the masses against the rest of the late spring/early summer slate.  The film wears its intentions on its sleeve, and it is not looking to flip the genre on its head, but that does not mean it is not full of surprises along the way.  It has such heart about it, and everything melds together so seamlessly that even now when it plays at home screens on VOD and streaming, it can easily draw in audiences away from their chores and treat them to a lively, lovely, little comedy.