“You simply need me to be such as you,” says 12-year-old Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) in Armageddon Time, unenamoured along with his posh new faculty uniform for the luxury new faculty his mother and father are making him go to. “No,” says his father (Jeremy Robust), “I would like you to be a complete lot higher than me. That’s what I would like.”

There’s a world of ache there, as there may be all through Armageddon Time, a semi-autobiographical melting-pot that explores a lot of what made the younger James Grey a person. That line – “I would like you to be a complete lot higher than me” – which mixes a father’s protectiveness with a self-loathing inseparable from his Jewishness, is delivered with heartbreaking humanity from Robust, whose uniquely troubled eyes ship desperation, insecurity, disappointment. Having gone to house with Advert Astra, Grey could be very a lot again on Earth right here, with a movie that goes to city on disappointment – in individuals, in politics, in ourselves. It’s about coping with it and constructing from it.

Lots of Grey’s movies are introspective, inside private journeys – Two Lovers, The Misplaced Metropolis Of Z and Advert Astra all really feel disarmingly intimate. However right here he has doubled down, taking a visit into his personal childhood with a soulful drama that follows his younger avatar, Paul, as he navigates adolescence inside that white middle-class Jewish upbringing.

The Jewish child befriends a Black child, and it’s one of the best of instances and the worst of instances, as Paul is handled to a succession of wake-up calls, his eyes slowly opening to the fact of the social construction propped up round him. Politics are by no means far-off: Paul’s left-leaning mother and father, gently aghast on the barely disguised bile popping out of Ronald Reagan’s mouth as he campaigns to be President, are usually not fairly as enlightened as they’d prefer to suppose. Grey will get into the cracks, tackling morality, class warfare and racism, however by no means with too heavy a hand, as Paul begins to see issues from totally different views.

So, it’s heat however not rose-tinted, candy however not sentimental. At worst it feels barely contrived in direction of its conclusion, with issues dramatised just a little bit greater than they perhaps wanted to be. However nonetheless, it’s a method to an finish, with the younger Paul studying – the arduous manner – about hypocrisy, injustice and privilege. By no means, although, on the expense of the movie remaining a touching character examine. It’s a plaintive piece of self-reflection – it yearns and aches.