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When sixth grader Paul Graf (Banks Repeta) dreams, he imagines himself as a legendary artist. Maybe he’ll be poised before an easel wearing a beret, his pale features set in a tastefully pretentious expression. Or maybe he’ll be basking in rapturous applause, with a crowd heralding a painting of his self-created superhero Captain United.
The life Paul grows into looks nothing like that, but he does become an artist. We know that because he is the alter ego of James Gray, the writer and director of Armageddon Time. Gray has beamed his soul into countless characters—from Tim Roth’s tormented hit man in Little Odessa (1994) to Brad Pitt’s ruminative astronaut in Ad Astra (2019)—but Armageddon Time marks the first time he has more or less directly adapted his own story to the screen.
The place is Queens and the year is 1980. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan is warning America about the coming of “another Sodom and Gomorrah,” but a nation’s supposed moral decline is small fry to a tween. Far more disturbing to Paul is a plot by his parents (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) to transfer him to a private school, wrenching him away from his best friend, Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb).
To Paul, this is an apocalyptic prospect. Like many young friendships, his relationship with Johnny is as complex and ferocious as a crush (when they flee a class field trip to the Guggenheim and sprint through Central Park, cinematographer Darius Khondji imbues the sequence with the wild, fantastical glee of first love).
After the two boys share a joint, Paul’s father makes good on his threat to send him to Forest Manor, a pampered prison of a school whose patrons include a lurking Fred Trump (John Diehl). It’s a fate Paul meekly accepts at first, then defiantly rejects, concocting a plan to steal a computer to pay for a trip to Florida with Johnny.
Gray loves a desperate, thwarted escape. In Two Lovers (2008), Joaquin Phoenix dropped a travel bag out the window of his parents’ apartment, then rushed to the courtyard to meet the fickle neighbor (Gwyneth Paltrow) he had deluded himself into adoring. Yet while Lovers overflowed with pure, lustrous pleasure, Armageddon Time is constantly pierced by painfully real physical and emotional wounds—both Paul’s and Johnny’s.
Paul’s family is white, middle class and Jewish; Johnny is Black and lives alone with his ailing grandmother (Marjorie Johnson). Both boys face bigotry, but Paul is slow to realize the game isn’t rigged against him the way it is against his friend. Nothing in the film is as horrifying as the scene in which he eagerly enlists Johnny in the computer heist, tragically unaware of how different the consequences will be for the two of them if they’re caught by the police.
Armageddon Time isn’t out to preach, teach or scold. Gray has no interest in the self-serving concept of “white guilt”; he simply tells his story cleanly and clearly. This is who he was. This is what he did. This is the friend he loved and failed—the friend who collected Apollo mission patches, worshipped his stepbrother in the Air Force, and felt his future die as handcuffs were clamped around his wrists.
While details of Gray’s life have been tweaked to suit the ephemeral language of cinema, to witness his soul searching is to behold his childhood yearnings, passions and regrets becoming present tense. At times, it’s a frightening experience, like looking at a photo album of both public joys (spaghetti dinners, toy rocket launches) and private traumas (nighttime arrests, bathroom beatings).
So why watch? Simply put, because a brilliant and compassionate filmmaker is asking you to—and because Armageddon Time gazes at America with neither hollow hope nor performative pessimism. Gray may not like what he sees, but he still insists that there are things worth fighting for, like clubhouse chats with friends and jelly beans fresh from grandpa’s pocket (a quietly fierce Anthony Hopkins plays Aaron Rabinowitz, the father of Paul’s mother).
Some moviegoers may argue that what Armageddon Time has to say about class, race and growing up in New York is hardly revelatory. Yet the film isn’t meant to be. Gray speaks seemingly simple truths and asks you not only to hear them, but to feel them. That’s what great artists—and human beings—do.
SEE IT: Armageddon Time, rated R, is now playing at Bridgeport, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center and Vancouver Mall.