In his cinematic memoir “Armageddon Time,” the filmmaker James Gray unpacks his early influences with the kind of uncommonly sensitive and keen perception that he has employed throughout his body of work, which has evolved from crime thrillers (“Little Odessa,” “The Yards,” “We Own The Night”) to historical dramas (“The Immigrant,” “The Lost City of Z”) to existential sci-fi explorations of love, existence and family (“Ad Astra”). In this childhood coming-of-age drama, set in 1980 in his hometown of Queens, New York, Gray manages to touch on all of these previous genre excursions — it’s a period piece, with childish experiments into mischief and criminal behavior, set against the backdrop of space exploration and a fascination with NASA.
Gray lays out the cultural influences swirling around Paul Graff (a remarkable Banks Repeta), his ostensible avatar, an art obsessed sixth grader who is in a transitional impressionistic moment, graduating from comic books to Kandinsky, from the Beatles to Sugarhill Gang. But there are bigger influences than just the artistic looming in Paul’s life— people who teach him a few of the hard truths about the world and how one should strive to show up in it.
One is his grandfather, Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), a gentle yet proper Englishman, whose mother was a Ukrainian Jew who escaped the pogroms in her village by fleeing to Liverpool. He is one of the few adults who shows Paul unconditional kindness and support, only asking in return that Paul try to “be a mensch” and stand up for those who have less than him.
