It’s generally not a good sign when a serious-looking movie with impressive credentials finds itself relegated to Prime Video with a minimum amount of hoopla.
James Gray’s Armageddon Time, for instance. Clearly autobiographical, it suffers from the obvious comparisons with Steven Spielberg’s more popular The Fabelmans.
Where Spielberg’s Jewish family live in movie-mad California, Gray’s Graff family are New Yorkers.
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Armageddon Time is also set a little later – in the early 80s, when Ronald Reagan was running for President.
Meet the family. Mum and Dad are played by Anne Hathaway and Succession’s Jeremy Strong. Grandpa is played by the world’s least likely New York Jewish Grandpa, Sir Anthony Hopkins.
They explain his accent by saying he was brought up in Liverpool, overlooking the fact that he’s also the world’s least likely Liverpudlian.
But our hero is young Paul, just starting high school. His dream is to draw comic books.
His parents are horrified. They insist he’s going to make something better of himself. Which means not hanging out with low-life undesirables.
But within a couple of days at school, Paul is getting in trouble with his new best mate Johnny, who happens to be black.
Mum shows her hypocrisy –Hathaway is nothing if not a good sport – by being both ultra-liberal and regularly racist. She decides to send Paul to a better class of school.
If Mum is nothing to write home about, Dad is borderline psychotic. If he’s not flaring up in violent rages when he can’t get his own way, he’s manically singing at the top of his lungs when he wakes up Paul to go to his new school.
You start to wonder if writer-director Gray realises quite how unappealing his presumably real-life family comes across.
They’re tribal Democrats – they’re convinced that the minute Ronald Reagan is elected he’ll start World War III. Yet they’re equally certain the only way young Paul can succeed is by enrolling in an exclusively right-leaning, Republican school.
Paul hates private school Forest Manor – particularly his bigoted classmates. He can’t talk to his Mum and Dad about it - understandably. I mean, I wouldn’t talk to Mr and Mrs Graff about the weather.
But at least he can open up to lovable, Liverpudlian New Yorker Grandpa.
And even phoning it in, Hopkins can bring focus to the scenes he’s in.
There are two conflicting messages here – that you need to behave well, to be a “mensch”, a decent human being. But, since life is unfair, you should take any advantage you can get, unfair or not.
And nowhere is this more clearly shown than in the Trump family – the real-life alumni of James Gray’s own old school.
The future president doesn’t feature, but his sinister father Fred Trump does, as well as his sister Marianne - a chilling performance by Jessica Chastain, delivering an end of term speech to Paul’s schoolmates.
Armageddon Time is an oddly off-balance film – most of the elements in it, after all, are reliable audience pleasers.
It’s a coming of age story, a plea for social justice, a New York family drama. It’s Mum, Dad, Grandpa, the death of disco and the sinister rise of neo-liberalism. And yet it doesn’t work at all.
Maybe every film-maker about to launch an autobiographical tale of his childhood – Gray here, Spielberg’s Fablemans, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast – should be reminded that just because its true doesn’t mean it’s convincing.
It takes a literary genius to translate the personal to the universal. And there isn’t a literary genius anywhere near Armageddon Time.
