Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Armageddon Time’ on Prime Video, in Which Director James Gray Wrestles With His Own Autobiographical Reminiscence

Filmmaker James Gray gets semi-autobiographical with Armageddon Time (now streaming on Prime Video), a period coming-of-age drama based on his upbringing in Queens, New York. The follow-up to Gray’s famously troubled sci-fi fable Ad Astra (he didn’t have final cut, but don’t worry, it’s still quite good) is notable for the following reasons: It marks the emergence of likely star-in-the-making Banks Repeta. It reiterates the considerable thespian powers of Anthony Hopkins. And it’s the second film of 2022 to enshrine Private Benjamin as a cultural touchstone of the year of our lord 1980 (see also: Empire of Light).  

ARMAGEDDON TIME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s the first day of sixth grade for Paul Graff (Repeta). His teacher is a humorless lump of putty named Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk), and Paul sets the tone for the year by sketching the guy as a turkey and getting busted with it. Good thing is, Paul’s a pretty good artist. Bad thing is, he’s a serial discipline case. He monkeys and clowns like he’s addicted to trouble. He quickly befriends his classmate Johnny (Jaylin Webb), who’s singled out by Turkey, well, pretty much because he’s Black, and Johnny isn’t one to take shit from anybody. They bond on that first day, washing blackboards while everyone else is learning. They hang out during a field trip to the Guggenheim, and ditch the rest of the class to run around the city and ride the subway and hit the record shop to buy the Sugar Hill Gang record. 

Johnny goes home to his grandmother, who’s losing her memory. We don’t see much of that situation, although he’ll soon talk about how he’s avoiding the people who want to put him in a foster home. Paul goes home to something best described as I-don’t-know-what: His father Irving (Jeremy Strong) is a repairman. His mother Esther (Anne Hathaway) is the president of the PTA, a position to which Paul mistakenly – amusingly! – assumes carries a lot of power. His brother Ted (Ryan Sell) is a dickhead who appears to have used his own serial delinquency to pave a path from public to private school for Paul. These people mostly kind of suck? There are some scenes here affirming that assertion, and some that repudiate it, so, as most families go, complication and opacity prevail above all. 

Thank jeez and jehoshaphat for Paul’s grandfather, then. Aaron (Hopkins) is a lovely, lovely man. He affectionately calls Paul “Jellybean.” He gives Paul a toy rocket for a first-day-of-school gift, and a paint set to encourage his artistic urges. Compare that to Irving and Esther, who think Paul should be more pragmatic about his desire to be an artist and have a back-up career plan, respectively. Aaron is calm and affectionate where everyone else is high-strung and neurotic – he’s seen and lived through a lot, and reaped the wisdom. Johnny and Paul get caught smoking a joint in the boys’ room, and Irving whips Paul with a belt while he cowers in the bathroom. Off to private school with Paul, then, because it’ll offer him discipline and a better education and, as his grandmother points out, none of the kids from “those other neighborhoods,” you know, kids like Johnny. (Thankfully, Aaron has some words of wisdom to share on that topic.) On Paul’s first day at Forest Manor Prep, he’s greeted by a mustached man who we soon learn is – please try to hold in your vomit – Fred Trump. If you just vomited, that’s OK, it’s a normal reaction.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Belfast minus the Movies Are Magic stuff, and The Fabelmans minus the Movies Are Complicated Reflections of Our Psychological Conundrums stuff. It’s also one of the rare movies set in the 1980s that aren’t drowning in referential pop-cultural miscellania – Adventureland and Call Me By Your Name also keenly avoid that trap.

Performance Worth Watching: When Repeta and Hopkins share the screen, they emanate warmth. Their chemistry is wonderful, and it’s the film’s primary energy source. 

Memorable Dialogue: Grandpa: “In your life you’re gonna have your ups and your downs, you’re gonna have big highs and your big lows, yabba dabba doo, so what!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Armageddon Time finds Gray wrestling with himself – to a stalemate. He opens himself up and lets his guts lie there, to be sympathized with or criticized. Notice how his stand-in Paul is treated compared to Johnny. It’s hard not to notice: It’s ugly. Blatantly racist. Not subtle, here or in real life. There’s talk of how Paul the aspiring artist has “a leg up” while others do not. A conversation with his immigrant, Holocaust-survivor grandfather about standing up and fighting against the kids at school who casually throw around the n-word. Lots of talk from his parents and grandmother about how attending a prestigious prep school will funnel him toward success – a prestigious prep school whose students are beneficiaries of the Trump family and chant Ronald Reagan’s name, while a scene or two later Paul’s mother laments the man’s presidential election win by expressing certainty that he’ll get everyone nuked off the face of the planet.

All these ironies, hard lessons and inner struggles are all but lost on a 12-year-old boy, but here, in retrospect, surely at least lightly fictionalized, Gray sees everything with clarity. His privilege put him where he is – he made Little Odessa, his first feature film, when he was 25, and found modest, niche success as a director of thoughtful adult dramas starring the likes of Joaquin Phoenix, Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard. Meanwhile, Johnny, Paul’s 50/50 co-conspirator in youthful misbehavior, who sneakily camped out in Paul’s backyard shed to duck social services, almost certainly faced the gnashing teeth of the system. 

And so Gray wrestles. Armageddon Time isn’t an inspirational story, or one that makes bold assertions. It’s an intuitive film, prompting one to ponder how it feels instead of expressing certainties about it. And it feels authentically like Gray’s point of view, portraying a crucial rite of passage where he was awakened to one of America’s great systemic cruelties, and surely didn’t fully comprehend it until many years later. Gray finds a lightly arc-less rhythm that feels like the texture of the time, a legit New York story – like many of his films – with grit, detail and humor. It’s his truth, a portrait of a kid from Queens who made a good friend and made good for himself, but never felt good about any of it. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Caucasian guilt in Armageddon Time is bald, raw, ugly and anti-sentimental; Gray shows us his unflattering truth and urges us to reject it. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.