'Armageddon Time' review: Queens-set drama is brutally honest
Michael Banks Repeta stars as Paul Graff and Jaylin Webb stars as Johnny Crocker in director James Gray's "Armageddon Time."
Credit: Focus Features/Anne Joyce
PLOT In 1980, an incident sends two young friends – one white, one Black – on very different paths.
CAST Anthony Hopkins, Banks Repeta, Jaylin Webb
RATED R (language, adult themes)
LENGTH 1:55
WHERE Area theaters
BOTTOM LINE Writer-director James Gray tells a personal story about class, race and survival.
Who wants to see a film about white privilege told through the eyes of a white filmmaker? James Gray may be opening himself up to some hostile criticism with “Armageddon Time,” a drama based on an incident from his boyhood. As autobiographical films go, however, this one has a rare and brutal honesty, asking you to sympathize with its fortunate young hero without letting him off the hook.
The year is 1980, the place is Queens and white kids like Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) are becoming entranced by Black culture in the form of hip-hop and rap. (Even the punk-rock nugget from The Clash that inspired this film’s title is a cover of a reggae tune by a Black Jamaican, Willie Williams.) A fifth-grader at his local public school, Paul knows that Black and white shouldn’t mix — but then again, he’s Jewish. Isn’t he kind of an outsider, too?
Paul takes a shine to Johnny (Jaylin Webb), a Black kid with a cheery disposition and a friendly smile. Johnny introduces Paul to hip-hop (The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”) but also to his first joint. When they’re caught smoking it, the boys' lives diverge.
Paul is no rich kid. His father, Irving, is a hot-tempered plumber (played by a funny yet frightening Jeremy Strong). His mother, Esther (a very brief Anne Hathaway), stays at home. But Esther’s father, Aaron (a wonderful Anthony Hopkins), is a classic immigrant success story, and he offers to pay for Paul’s tuition at a posh prep school, Forest Manor. “You’re gonna be OK, kid,” Aaron tells him. As for Johnny, he becomes a runaway, sometimes sleeping in the clubhouse in Paul’s backyard.
It’s somewhat jarring to see Donald Trump’s family — his father, Fred (John Diehl) and his sister Maryanne (Jessica Chastain) — show up to speak at Forest Manor, but that’s because it’s based on the Kew-Forest School, which Gray attended; the director said he remembers both Trumps speaking there. (The future President also was a student there.) They serve as effective if heavy-handed examples of a certain brand of blinkered self-congratulation.
What ultimately happens to Paul and Johnny shouldn’t be spoiled here; it’s enough to say that, in a decisive moment, Paul is thrown a lifeline and takes it. Gray makes no excuses in “Armageddon Time,” and it would be pretty self-serving to point any fingers. After all, you’d take it, too.
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