Armageddon Time

Armageddon Time

In “Armageddon Time,” Paul Graff is an 11-year-old boy, who people are always trying to wake up (played with sensitivity by Michael Banks Repeta). He’s a small, quiet sixth-grader in 1980 Queens. From the start of school until his family watches the returns of the Presidential election in November two months we see Paul waking up from deep sleep while different members of his family try to get him out of bed: His father, Irving (Jeremy Strong), dances in his room. His older brother Ted (Ryan Sell) jumps on his chest. His mother tells him to get ready for school.

These awakenings break up other awakenings for Paul, some recognized at the time and some only seen later by writer-director James Gray (“Aftersun”), who based “Armageddon Time” on his own experiences. Like many stories about kids between 11 and 12 years old from Dorothy in “Oz” and Riley in “Outside In” to Harry Potter and Tom Sawyer these are last moments of childhood when everything seems possible; when the world reveals itself as also full of trouble. These are memories that ache with knowledge that there was so much more ahead. And all this stuff may have happened differently or not at all, but not much mattered more.

Paul lives with both parents and one sibling: an older brother. He spends a lot of time with his supportive grandfather (Anthony Hopkins). They love each other deeply and without reservation: It is mutual adoration society; he is Paul’s greatest ally and wisest counsel; etc., etc. When Paul tells his parents he wants to be an artist they say he has to do something less risky; but then grandfather gives him set of grown-up paints. Parents say over dinner that night they don’t think he’s as smart as Ted or will have same chances for what they most want their boys to have, “a seat at the table.” But his grandfather tells him never to let anyone tell him what he can’t do.

Paul befriends a new student at his school named Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb), the only black kid in his class, who is bigger than everyone else because he has been held back. They become friends after getting in trouble on their first day Paul for drawing a caricature of the teacher, Johnny for being rude to her after she belittles him yet again. The following week they cut a school trip and spend a perfect day together in Manhattan; but then they get caught.

Afterward, Paul’s parents transfer him to a private school across town called Kew-Forrest (where Fred Trump sent his kids Maryanne, the future judge, and Donald). On his first day there, US attorney Maryanne Trump (Jessica Chastain) gives an assembly on ambition and achievement while her father, Fred (Michael Stuhlbarg), watches from the audience.

But Paul’s grandfather’s definition never really leaves him: A mensch is someone who stands up for people being treated unfairly. His grandfather tells him about Paul’s great-grandmother she was 16 when Cossacks killed her parents because they were Jews.

However bigoted kids at his new school might be casually racist toward Johnny (or outright hostile to Puerto Ricans like Roberto or Dominicans like Tito or Cubans like Maximo), however much pressure he feels from his parents not to hang out with someone who keeps getting him in trouble it doesn’t matter. He wants so badly to fit in somewhere that every complicated situation becomes an opportunity for Paul to decide whether he should do what feels right or what will make people like him.

The movie means well you can tell by how hard it works to fold Reagan into the story of Johnny and Mensch-dom, and also by how sincerely it tries to create a sense of place but its ambitions are almost oppressively noble. It touches on everything we know now about the future presidency of Donald Trump especially regarding women’s allegations against him, and how we heard them but didn’t believe them without leaving much room for us to feel or discover anything new.

It is a movie that wants to do a lot. Some of its scenes are effective (many of those feature Repeta and Hopkins, who are both quite good), others are not (as with the mother character: Hathaway is affectionate and amused until she has to be angry or upset, at which point she does what she can). The shift in her attitude toward the principal defending Paul then, once they’re in the car on the way home, saying what she really thinks is one of the film’s best moments. And she becomes deeply moving when it becomes clear to us (if not yet to Paul) that something very sad has happened to her.

But the film isn’t very good at making other characters plausible. The father is either cruel or kind and understanding, depending on what the plot needs a shift not sufficiently motivated by anything he’s been through. The brother and public-school teacher roles are both thinly conceived.

More than anything else, it’s the failure of imagination in the script that rankles in relation to Johnny. Much of the movie is essentially an apology to this character and all those like him who were failed at home and abused everywhere else by all the people and systems that were supposed to support them. It’s devastating to watch Johnny be insulted by his teacher, or sneered at by older Black kids who can’t see why he should dream of working for NASA. Why wouldn’t he want to get as far from here as possible?

Webb is a touching young performer, and his eyes speak volumes. His face comes alive with a few flickers of hope or connection in Johnny’s life. But Johnny himself is underwritten; he’s a bundle of attributes more than a person. He doesn’t have the same interiority as some of the other characters, which feels, once again, like one more way we’ve let him down.

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