James Ransone's Loose-Cannon Heroes

James Ransone died on Friday at age 46. Born in Baltimore, Ransone took the journey of an East Coast character actor. He started off in Larry Clark’s disturbing ersatz- Kids self-ripoff Ken Park and paid dues in single episodes of Law & Order and Third Watch . With dark black hair and a blend of insolence and vulnerability, best observed as he looked up from under his brows, his signature move as a performer, Ransome created jittery young men on the margins of their own lives. He belongs to the John Cazale school, but retrofitted for the VOD and horror era. He played dirty cops, naïve clean ones who get killed, and naïve clean ones who survive in equal measure. He played a low-level porn actor in one Sean Baker film and a pimp in Tangerine , Baker’s best film. Anxiety and nervousness are not the same thing: Ransome could do both. Of course, his artistic legacy will forever be anchored to Ziggy Sobotka, the willful, deluded failson of a longshoreman boss in Season 2 of The Wire . Ziggy started fights and got his ass kicked. He got a pet duck that died of alcohol poisoning. Ziggy churned up the worst kind of enemies and found himself in over his head as often as he breathed. You know this guy: a working-class nepo baby who is deeply irritating, but who carries a twinkle in his eye and reels off the best one-liners. When his makeshift crew of other longshoremen steal luxury cars in the port of Baltimore, Ransone’s Ziggy offers one of the lines of the season. As his crew of scrubs puts the finishing touches on their heist, Ziggy pulls up in a German sports car alongside his buddy and smirks: “Always pays to go with the union card!” Ransone’s Ziggy Sobotka blazed a path that would bring Aaron Paul three Emmys for his work as Jesse Pinkman on Breaking Bad . There can be no two ways about this. The street Emmy belongs to Ransone. Ziggy is trapped in the ways that so many young people are trapped, in dying cities and in dying industries. Upskilling and making a go of it in Bushwick is not an option. The ports that his father ran and the churches like Holy Rosary built for his Polish community, and the childhood friendships that are the only friendships he will ever have-these are the hard bonds that held Ziggy Sobotka in place. Moments of triumph fall on Jesse Pinkman’s life. Nothing of the sort fell on Ziggy’s. If you want to examine the struggling white millennial male on TV, consider Ransone’s and Paul’s performances as photo negatives of each other. In 2021 he posted a letter on Instagram that detailed his childhood abuse at the hands of a math tutor. It is, as all recollections from sexual assaults survivors are, excruciating. He had the bravery to talk about the “lifetime of shame and embarrassment” that so many survivors carry through their...

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