One of an elite handful of American directors repeatedly invited back to compete at the Cannes film festival, New Yorker James Gray returns to the Croisette this week for the world premiere of his fourth Palm d’Or contender, Armageddon Time. Featuring a heavyweight ensemble cast including Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong of Successionfame, Gray’s eighth feature is his most nakedly autobiographical yet, a poignant coming-of-age story dramatising real events that happened to him and his family back in 1980.
Banks Repeta stars as Paul Graff, Gray’s on-screen alter ego, a plausibly dorky high-schooler growing up in a lower-middle-class Jewish household in New York City’s outer suburbs. Paul has fanciful ambitions of becoming an artist, but his mother Esther (Hathaway) and father Irving (Strong), a plumber with a violent temper, insist he follows the conventional American Dream route of college, steady job and upward social mobility.
