Graffiti on the subways, early hip hop on the radio, Reagan on the campaign trail: the new film from New York-born writer-director James Gray (Ad Astra; The Immigrant) unfolds at a transitional moment in American popular culture, catching a nation at the dawn of a decade where exciting new art forms emerged against fraught promises of economic prosperity and the threat of global apocalypse.
Gray has long threaded elements of his Russian Jewish family experience through his films, but Armageddon Time – its title pulling double duty as a play on The Clash song and the 40th president's predilection for doomsaying – is the 53-year-old filmmaker's most autobiographical work to date, a coming-of-age tale centred around the exploits of a pre-teen dreamer on the streets of New York in 1980.
The filmmaker's avatar is Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a 12-year-old redhead from a lovingly noisy home in suburban Queens, where his hardworking, middle-class parents – home economics teacher Esther (Anne Hathaway) and plumber Irving (Succession's Jeremy Strong) – are a source of domestic friction, and his elderly grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) is something of a mischievous, tale-spinning confidante.
