Armageddon Time: A Lotta People Won’t Get No Justice, by David Bax

James Gray’s Armageddon Time is reported to be heavily autobiographical and the math supports that. Gray was born in New York in 1969 so, in 1980—the year the film is set—he would have been about the same age as Paul (Banks Repeta), the movie’s protagonist. If young Gray’s life was nearly as sheltered as Paul’s, though, it seems unlikely he would have been immersed in the sound system-type music we hear or familiar with the graffiti-style look of the film’s title treatment. In fact, it’s a curious thing for the movie to start off with such signifiers of Black American culture given how little interest it has in its one Black character other than how he reflects Paul’s journey.

In many ways, Armageddon Time resembles a standard iteration of the “coming of age” genre (though not all such films are blessed with the lovely, textured cinematography of Darius Khondji). Paul is a shy, well-behaved boy who’s tempted by the seemingly carefree lives of his school’s rebels and delinquents but lacks the confidence or social graces to do anything about it. Meanwhile, his parents (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) seem to encourage little else in them than to be meek and get good grades. Only his doting grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) is able to meet Paul on respectful, equal ground.

Gray does a (sometimes painfully) excellent job illustrating the interior life of a misunderstood kid. It’s no secret that, much of the time, adults and children seem to live on different planets. But what does a kid do when he doesn’t seem to speak the language of either? Paul has his drawings to express himself but Armageddon Time is too honest to pretend that that’s enough, even if his artistic tendencies were encouraged.

This “man without a country” milieu continues in the way Gray uses the various spaces Paul occupies to draw out his insecurities. The boy is constantly bounced back and forth between the cloistered environments of his home and family and public ones—schools, stores and the streets that connect them to one another. Interestingly, it’s at a museum–a place that is both public and, in its own way, cloistered, that Paul seems comfortable. But here we see Gray the adult sympathizing not just with his young stand-in but also with the parents, who must constantly decide whether to protect their children from the world or to let them grow by exposing them to it. Of course, some of those decision are made for you by the presence of money—Paul’s parents may not have a ton of it but the older generation is more than comfortable enough to help them out. Priorities in parenting often seem to follow options.

And here’s where Armageddon Time takes a turn for the worse. Paul’s family have the option of sending him to a private school when things start to go south at the public one. But Paul’s only school chum, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), who’s Black and poor, doesn’t have any such safety net. Gray’s palpable guilt about these facts seeps into the film and blots out any potential character traits for Johnny other than as a receptacle for it.

There’s something nauseatingly conspicuous about the white guilt on display here. Gray appears to be making a big show of how bad he feels only so he can make a similarly big spectacle out of forgiving himself. It’s a forced, reverse-engineered catharsis. Making art as therapy only works when it’s actually therapeutic. Armageddon Time feels more like an exercise in rationalization.