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In Armageddon Time, writer-director James Gray tries his hand at autobiography. He drops us into his Queens neighborhood in 1980, the year he started 6th grade, over a period of 10 weeks concluding around Thanksgiving. In the course of the movie, we watch his precocious, mop-headed stand-in, an aspiring artist named Paul (Banks Repeta), grow from a naïvely reckless tween to someone on the path to understanding, with clear-headedness, the pervasiveness of societal inequality and how he stands to benefit from it if he taps into it wisely. Some of that comes from his acute unease when his well-meaning middle-class parents, Esther and Irving (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong, both excellent), cart him off into an “elite” private school overseen by Fred Trump (John Diehl). But much more of it comes at the expense of Johnny (Jaylin Webb), the first middle-school friend he makes pre-transfer and who also is his class’ sole Black student. 

Made with impeccable period detail, Armageddon Time becomes a canvas onto which Gray can indict the still-going-strong racial and class divides perpetuated by educational opportunity and the way his performatively liberal family exercises its privilege — especially as it relates to education — when it can. The film is often shrewd exploring those frustrations. Its sharpest moment comes when a cameoing Jessica Chastain, playing Trump’s daughter Maryanne, preaches with conviction the meritocracy gospel to a group of private-schoolers who, like her, will soon delusionally consider whatever successes they’ve attained sheerly the product of hard work. The contradictoriness of Paul’s family’s casual racism and its image of itself as progressive (they’re vocally anti-Reagan) is bluntly underlined but avoids the kind of overelaboration that would take away the conversational naturalism with which it appears. Most coming-of-age movies soak in nostalgia’s warmth. Armageddon Time is more interested in putting a blacklight to the less-than-flattering details nostalgia is good at obscuring. Gray, in a film that feels like a protracted act of telling on himself, refreshingly turns the by-and-large rose-colored genre on its head.

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