Based heavily on Gray’s own upbringing in a middle-class New York Jewish family, Armageddon Time is the story of Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a compassionate sixth-grader with aspirations of becoming an artist – a goal met with calm disregard by his father Irving (Jeremy Strong), a plumber, and his mother, Esther (Anne Hathaway), who is president of the local PTA. Where Paul often feels at odds with his parents, he adores his Grandpa Aaron (an unbearably sweet Anthony Hopkins) and finds the old man’s world view to be much more aligned with his own. On the first day of term, Paul befriends his Black classmate Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb) and soon witnesses firsthand the daily iniquities he endures from racist teachers, bigoted students, and police. Armageddon Time is about young Paul calibrating his moral compass off the people around him, weighing up real-world events against the history that has been handed down to him. Early in the film, Grandpa Aaron recounts the story of his own Jewish mother fleeing Ukraine after seeing her parents killed; but in his comfortable suburban home Paul’s lived experience (compared to his friend Johnny’s at least) is one of extraordinary privilege. He struggles to relate to the narrative of otherness and resilience that defined his grandparents and with which his own parents have dutifully fallen in line. The film asks: what obligation do children like Paul have to carry forward, and live in deference to, the trauma of generations past? Paul seems more at risk of finding himself on the wrong side of history; after switching to a new private school, he is surrounded by wealthy white racists, taking life advice from keynote speeches delivered by Maryanne Trump (in a surprising cameo by from Jessica Chastain).

Jaylin Webb as Johnny Davis and Banks Repeta as Paul Graff in Armageddon Time (Universal Pictures) 

The film’s absolute highlight is a sequence on a park bench between grandfather and grandson, in which Paul agonises over sticking up for Johnny versus fitting in at his new school, and Aaron tries to find the most straightforward way of explaining to a sixth-grader the principle of evil flourishing when good people do nothing. The solution, as he puts it, is simple: ‘Be a mensch.’ By modern standards, Grandpa Aaron’s world view is refreshingly intersectional; his family didn’t survive violent European anti-Semitism just so Black kids in Queens could endure the same sickening cruelties half a century later. With his age and perspective, Aaron sees no difference between the two – whereas Irving and Esther are more inclined to view their own plight as something distinct and disconnected from Johnny’s. In this way, Armageddon Time delves frankly into the notion of intercultural discrimination, and the idea that any one disenfranchised group – defined by race or class or creed – can easily turn on another just as soon as they have got one foot in the door, jealously guarding the progress and prosperity for which they have fought so hard. Irving sums this up best when he says, ‘You make the most of your break and do not look back’ (regardless of who is still back there), a sort of moral neo-liberalism that tidily connects with the looming spectre of Reaganism haunting the film’s television sets and background audio. It’s one of Reagan’s televised interviews – in which the presidential candidate posits that ‘we may be the generation that sees Armageddon’ – that lends the film its name, and Gray potently recreates the claustrophobic feeling one gets at Paul’s age that the sky may truly start falling at any given moment.

With its sure-footed ethical interrogations, Armageddon Time is a greater success thematically than experientially. The brilliant Darius Khondji’s cinematography, as well as Christopher Spelman’s sparse instrumental score, are folded inconspicuously into the autumnal, crepuscular New York of Gray’s memories. With an almost two-hour runtime and very little by way of stylistic flourishes, this is an extremely confident yet markedly restrained film, more concerned with underlying authenticity than it is with grand gestures or thesis statements. Even when the culminating parental speech arrives at the finale (a hallmark of such films), it is fittingly gloomy and low-key, almost self-defeating. James Gray’s own moral compass seems so clear, his philosophical standpoint so precise, that our viewing experience feels restricted to something more rhetorical than emotional. Some films in our current wave of auteurist memoir rely too heavily on overwrought, hyper-sentimental nostalgia – if anything, Armageddon Time could have permitted itself just a touch more of this indulgence.

Armageddon Time (Universal), runs for 114 minutes and is released on 3 November 2022.