The 2003 firehouse closure protest was not glamorous. Fifty demonstrators outside City Hall is a small demonstration by any standard; it did not, on its own, change the mayor’s decision. But it represented a choice to use his name and presence in a specific fight rather than a general statement of support, which made it meaningfully different from issuing a press release saying that firefighters do important work. He was there as a former firefighter who had something specific to say about what closing firehouses meant to communities that had just lost colleagues — not as a celebrity making a cameo in someone else’s advocacy.
The Sandy cleanup in Breezy Point in 2012 followed the same pattern. Breezy Point had been particularly badly affected by Sandy, with fires burning through the flooded neighborhood in ways that were both spectacular and devastating. The neighborhood had a high concentration of FDNY and NYPD families — people who were Buscemi’s professional community in the extended sense of the institution — and showing up to help with cleanup was an expression of the same instinct that had brought him to Ground Zero in 2001. The work was cleanup: unglamorous, physical, collective.
The documentary work was different in character but consistent in direction. A Good Job: Stories of the FDNY gave him a vehicle for using his film industry connections — specifically his connection to HBO, which had been producing Boardwalk Empire — in service of a story about the department. The choice to bring Liz Garbus in as director, rather than directing the film himself, reflected a specific judgment: the story needed a perspective from outside the institution, and Garbus, with her track record in documentary filmmaking about complex subjects, was better positioned to provide that perspective than Buscemi himself, who was too close to the subject to be fully external to it.