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    Is ‘The Idea of You’ Harry Styles Fan Fiction?

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    The filmmakers do more to align star and character than the novel did. But somehow that doesn’t make the movie indebted to the musician.Hayes Campbell, the dreamy protagonist of the new rom-com “The Idea of You,” has a bit in common with the mega pop star Harry Styles:In the movie, Hayes, played by Nicholas Galitzine, is a member of August Moon, a boy band with tons of very ardent teen and tween girl fans. Styles was a member of a boy band called One Direction. You’ve probably heard of it.Hayes is British. So is Harry Styles.Hayes eventually quits his band and starts making soulful pop rock. So did Harry.Hayes likes to date older women, and his relationship with a gallerist named Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway) is the backbone of the film. Harry, too, has been involved in tabloid-documented relationships with older women, most famously, the actress and director Olivia Wilde.So does “The Idea of You” come off as an act of fan fiction? Bizarrely, no, even if the shadow of Styles does loom large over the whole project.Plenty of headlines have already described the movie as “Harry Styles fan fiction,” though Robinne Lee, the author of the 2017 novel on which it is based, is typically coy in interviews about whether the pop star inspired her book.August Moon, the band in the film, above, resembles One Direction more than the band in the original novel does.Amazon Studios“Inspired is a strong word,” Lee has said. The author, who is also an actress with degrees from Yale and Columbia Law School and perhaps best known for her appearances in films like “Hitch” and “Fifty Shades Darker,” has described encountering “the face of a boy I’d never seen in a band I’d never paid attention to” and thinking it was “art.” After the novel became a viral sensation, Lee told Vogue in 2020, “This was never supposed to be a book about Harry Styles.” In a piece for Time published this month, Lee argued that “assuming a novel with a fictional celebrity in a relationship must be based on an existing celebrity — in this case, the internet has decided, Harry Styles — is unimaginative at best and sexist at worst.”She is certainly less explicit about a pop star connection than Anna Todd, whose “After” series of novels started explicitly as Styles fan fiction on the platform Wattpad and have since been turned into a film franchise. (It’s a path that might be familiar to fans of “Fifty Shades,” which started as “Twilight” fan fiction.) However, unlike “The Idea of You,” the “After” series has nothing to do with a boy band. The Harry of “After” is a college student named Hardin, but when the first novel was published in 2014, the portrayal outraged some One Direction lovers with the way it turned Styles into a bad boy manipulating a young woman. One 14-year-old Styles fan told The New York Times then: “The way Harry in this book is portrayed is disgusting.”On the other hand, Styles fans have embraced “The Idea of You” as text that can feed their obsession. Kayla Kleinman, a social media manager at Bookshop.org, was not a Styles devotee when she first read the novel, but became one after finishing it during the pandemic. She felt “emotionally attached” to the book, and wanted the experience of reading it to continue, she said in an interview. So she sought out Styles’s music. “In my head it felt like a continuation of the story even though I very much knew that they were not,” she said. “But to me that next step was being like, ‘OK, I’m going to dive into this world as a thing to entertain myself.’” Now Kleinman has even gone to Harry Styles concerts with a friend she made from an “Idea of You” Facebook group.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Idea of You’ Review: Surviving Celebrity

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      Anne Hathaway headlines a movie that’s got a lot to say about the perils of fame.Women of a certain age (that is, my age) feel like they grew up alongside Anne Hathaway, because, well, we did. We were awkward teens together when she made “The Princess Diaries” in 2001. We felt ourselves to be put-upon entry-level hirelings right when “The Devil Wears Prada” came out in 2006. We understood her broken-down narcissistic addict in “Rachel Getting Married,” because who couldn’t? And we watched the Hathaway backlash, pegged to public perception that she was trying too hard, and worried that people saw us the same way.Now we’re 40-ish. We know for sure that Gen Z considers millennials to be cringe, and, thankfully, we no longer feel the need to care. The greatest gift of reaching middle age is having settled into yourself, and that is apparently what Hathaway, age 41, has done. She has been through the celebrity wringer (and more) and come out the other side looking radiant, with a long list of credits in movies that swing from standard commercial fare to auteurist masterpieces.This is perhaps why it’s so satisfying to see her name come first — alone, before the title credit — in “The Idea of You,” which is on its surface a relatively fluffy little film. Based on the sleeper hit novel by Robinne Lee, “The Idea of You” is plainly fantasy, in the fan fiction mold, that poses the question: What if Harry Styles, the British megastar and former frontman of One Direction, fell madly in love with a hot 40-year-old mom? In this universe, the Styles character is Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the British frontman of a five-member boy band called August Moon.Hathaway plays Solène Marchand, an art gallery owner whose arrogantly useless ex-husband, Daniel (Reid Scott), buys v.i.p. meet-and-greet tickets for their 16-year-old daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), and her two best friends, all of whom were huge August Moon fans … in the seventh grade. The event is at Coachella, and Daniel is set to take the teenagers but backs out at the last second, citing a work emergency. Solène reluctantly agrees to take them, and while at the festival, mistakes Hayes’s trailer for the bathroom. They meet, it’s cute, and you can guess what happens next.Or can you? It was clear about 10 minutes into the movie that what was required for enjoyment was to surrender to the daydreaming, and so, with very little internal protest, I did. How could I resist? Solène is smart, competent, kind and secure; she has great hair and a great wardrobe; and most important, she seems like a real person, even if the situation in which she finds herself greatly stretches the bonds of credibility. More than once, I was struck by how authentically 40 Solène seemed to me — a woman capable of making her own decisions, even ones she thinks might be ill-advised — and how weirdly rare it is to see that kind of character in a movie. She has a kid, and friends, and a career. She reads books and looks at art, and she is flattered by this 24-year-old superstar’s attention but takes a long time to come around to the idea that it may not be a joke.Solène also feels real shame and real resolve in the course of the winding fairy tale story, which predictably has to go south. But most of all, she’s in a movie that doesn’t try to shame her, or patronize her, or make her appear ridiculous for having desires and fantasies of her own. She’s just who she is, and it’s simple to understand her appeal to someone whose life has never been his own.Directed by Michael Showalter, who wrote the adapted screenplay with Jennifer Westfeldt, “The Idea of You” succeeds mostly because of Hathaway’s performance, though she and Galitzine spark and banter pleasurably (and he can dance and sing, too). It tweaks the novel in a number of ways — Hayes is older than the book’s character, for one thing — and also seems to implicitly know it’s a movie, and that movies have a strange relationship with age-gap romances.In fact, that’s one of its strengths. Several times, characters remark on the double standard attached to people’s judgment of Solène and Hayes’s relationship, hypothesizing that in a gender-swapped situation, people would be high-fiving the older man who landed the hot younger star. Sixteen years looks like a lot on paper, but in the movies, at least, it is barely a blip.That musing is interesting enough, if a familiar one. More fascinating in “The Idea of You” is its treatment of the cage of celebrity. Hayes seems mature compared with his bandmates and the girls who follow them around, but he’s also clearly stuck in some kind of arrested development. And I do mean stuck: He is self-aware enough to tell Solène, plaintively, that he auditioned for the band when he was 14 and not much has changed beyond his level of fame. He wants a life beyond the spotlight, badly.And that’s just what he can’t get. Neither can Solène, nor, eventually, anyone around her. The idea of living a quiet life might obviously be out of reach, but the added elements of tabloid news and rabid fans unafraid to treat Hayes as if they know him make things far worse. The film starts to feel a little like the tale of a monster, but the monster is parasociality, encouraged by the illusion of intimacy that the modern superstar machine relies on to keep selling tickets and merch and albums and whatever else keeps the star in the spotlight.It’s probably coincidental that “The Idea of You” comes on the heels of Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” on which she strongly implies that her carefully cultivated fandom has made her love life a nightmare. But spiritually, at least, they’re of a piece — even if the origins of the film’s plot seem as much borne of parasociality as a critique of it. And that makes Hathaway’s performance extra poignant. She’s been dragged into that buzz saw before. And somehow, she’s figured out how to make a life on the other side of it.The Idea of YouRated R for getting hot and heavy, plus some language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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      ‘The Interview’ Podcast: Anne Hathaway

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      This is the debut of The Interview, The New York Times’s new weekly series, featuring in-depth conversations with fascinating people. Each week, David Marchese or Lulu Garcia-Navarro will speak with notable figures in the worlds of culture, politics, business, sports, wellness and beyond. Like the Magazine’s former Talk column, the conversations will appear online and in print, but now you can also listen to them in our new weekly podcast, “The Interview,” which is available wherever you get your podcasts. Below, you’ll find David’s first interview with the actress Anne Hathaway; Lulu’s first interview, with the Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, is here.Listen to the conversation with Anne HathawayOn the debut of ’The Interview,’ the actress talks to David Marchese about learning to let go of other people’s opinions.On one level, Anne Hathaway’s new movie, “The Idea of You,” which arrives on Prime Video on May 2 and is directed by Michael Showalter, couldn’t be more straightforward. It’s an adaptation of Robinne Lee’s hit romance novel about Solène, a divorced 40-year-old mom played by Hathaway, who winds up in a relationship with a much younger man — a singer in a boy band, played by Nicholas Galitzine. Warmhearted and with unabashed mainstream appeal, the film is a return for the New Jersey-raised actress, who has fruitfully spent much of her time lately playing thornier characters in indie films, to the kinds of charming fish-out-of-water tales that first helped bring her to stardom, like “The Princess Diaries” and “The Devil Wears Prada.” This time, though, instead of being the plucky ingénue thrust into a glamorous, high-pressure situation, Hathaway is playing a character who’s coming into a new world a little less starry-eyed, and with a firmer sense of self.But “The Idea of You” also works on another, more complicated, even self-referential level. It’s a movie about a woman pushing against societal expectations and getting a lot of grief for it, which is something Hathaway, 41, knows about. More than a decade ago, around the time she won an Academy Award for her work in “Les Misérables,” the online commentariat turned on Hathaway for … who knows, exactly? Some strange groupthink kicked in that caused people to pile on her for seeming like an inauthentic striver — or something. Other than as a case study in the inexplicable and random cruelty of the internet, the whole phenomenon, described at the time as Hathahate, makes even less sense now than it did then.Since that time, Hathaway told me when we talked twice last month, she has been learning to let go of other people’s opinions and expectations of her as an actress, a celebrity and a human being. This has made her work even more compelling to watch and made her more guarded as a public figure. “I really like expressing myself through my work,” says Hathaway, who after so many years and so many great performances is still figuring out the best way to play the puzzling real-life part of a famous actress.There are a bunch of things that are intriguing to me about the new movie. One of them is that there are a few of what I took to be Anne Hathaway psychological Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the film. I’ll get to those, but first: You haven’t done a romance in a while. Can you talk to me about why you wanted to do “The Idea of You”? It’s such a softball question, and I can feel my brain complicating it. More

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      ‘Eileen’ Review: Sudden Fire, Sudden Danger

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      Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in a period thriller that brings cathartic nastiness to a cold New England Christmas.Exceptions exist, of course, but protagonists in mainstream movies labeled feminist tend to fall along two lines. One is the endearing woman who has to break out of the cage she hadn’t even known she was in (think the girlbossing of “Barbie,” more or less). The other is the hot mess rom-com heroine, who is, as advertised, both super hot and an agent of abject chaos, her life and habits and relationships in perpetual ruins.The pleasure of “Eileen” is that its titular protagonist is all of these and none of them: repellent, bitter, repressed and in search of liberation that arrives in a decidedly unsexy manner. In some ways the story is familiar — small-town girl with a terrible life yearns to break free, and meets someone who represents that freedom — but it’s all filtered through a dirty mirror, a noir with shmutz rubbed onto the lens. Eileen’s unpleasantness is also her appeal; this girl certainly is no boss, she’s incapable of rousing speeches, and she’s never going to mutate into a heroine. She is, in other words, familiar.The movie she’s in is a psychosexual thriller, kind of. Ottessa Moshfegh, along with Luke Goebel, adapted Moshfegh’s 2015 novel into a screenplay that’s relatively faithful to the original, but with a few key twists that ensure tension for viewers who’ve read the book. Yet the outlines remain the same: It is the early 1960s, and Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father in some gray, nameless New England town. Eileen’s clerical job at the local boys’ correctional center is stultifying and upsetting, or it would be if Eileen, who is in her mid-20s, could muster the ability to be upset anymore. (“Everyone’s kinda angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” she tells someone.)One day right before Christmas, the new prison counselor turns up, a pulled-together platinum blonde named Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) who seems to have floated in from another dimension. She’s educated, she jokes with the staff and she dresses in a way that emphasizes her curves. Rebecca is comfortable in the world in a way Eileen finds magnetizing. Swiftly, Rebecca becomes her center of gravity, the encapsulation of her dreams. It’s the sort of infatuation a teenager might develop, somewhere between wanting a person and wanting to be a person, but with Rebecca around, Eileen’s bloodless life is injected with sudden fire, and danger, too.McKenzie’s accent is a bit wobblier than Hathaway’s, but once you’re over that hump, the pair are thrilling together. McKenzie plays Eileen as a wide-eyed girl in arrested development who might have been an ingénue if she’d ever had a moment to sparkle. Instead her flat affect, which on someone else might be mysterious and intriguing, turns her invisible. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candor, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”So Rebecca, whom Eileen’s father would probably term a “dame” (or maybe a “hussy”), comes like a bolt from the frigid blue, though more sophisticated eyes than Eileen’s can detect some kind of performativity in her self-presentation. She is, after all, a female Harvard graduate (not, she emphasizes, Radcliffe) in early ’60s New England. She’s been educated with men and now works in a prison for boys and seems perfectly comfortable taunting men in a dive bar. She’s developed a kind of bombshell casing, for reasons unknown but easy to guess at. Hathaway’s performance is pure Hollywood siren wrapped in a wool skirt suit. What she is hiding, her motivations — that’s all opaque, and despite a veneer of vulnerability, there’s something just a little seedy about her.These sorts of women, off-putting and maddeningly erratic, tied to the physical in a way that makes others uneasy, are familiar territory for Moshfegh. She’s perhaps best known for her 2018 novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman who in response to grief develops an addiction to sleeping pills and their accompanying twilight state. In Moshfegh’s imagination, emotional states are signaled by bodily obsessions viewed with disapproval in polite society. For Eileen, this manifests in compulsive behavior: masturbating while spying on a couple in a car, only to stuff snow down her tights to stifle the impulse, or chewing candies and spitting them back out by the bowlful, in an attempt to control her body size. (In the novel, she’s also scatologically fixated, downing laxatives and frequently commenting on fecal matters; the film, perhaps necessarily, carves this part away.)But the story is also a perfect pairing for its director, William Oldroyd, whose previous film, the 2017 thriller “Lady Macbeth,” introduced Florence Pugh to the world. Oldroyd’s cold but keen eye for women pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown by boorish, violent men meets rich ground here. Not just Eileen, but Rebecca and several other female characters are not good or angelic women, and yet they’ve clearly bent themselves to fit molds made by men. The film’s titles, its grain, its shots that bathe Rebecca and Eileen in glowy red lights and deep shadows — it’s all meant to evoke the period, but also an era where women like these fit in like a wrong-handed glove.All of this adds up to discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. Unlike this year’s big movies about women breaking free from oppressive circumstances — the aforementioned “Barbie,” the forthcoming “Poor Things,” among others — it is not obvious that Eileen is destined to find a fuller, richer life free from the confines of patriarchy. She may not be the kind of person who really can. She is, in fact, rather ordinary, not — to return to her father’s statement — the kind of person who’s in a movie, who makes decisions and does things.Except, of course, she’s the lead of her own movie now. Refusing to make Eileen into a girlboss or a heroine or even an example is what makes the whole thing so delicious, so cathartic, so strangely realistic, even if the viewer is left a little horrified. “Eileen” is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.EileenRated R. A whole lot of nasty business. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Eileen’ Review: Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway Thrill in Adaptation

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      Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in a period thriller that brings cathartic nastiness to a cold New England Christmas.Exceptions exist, of course, but protagonists in mainstream movies labeled feminist tend to fall along two lines. One is the endearing woman who has to break out of the cage she hadn’t even known she was in (think the girlbossing of “Barbie,” more or less). The other is the hot mess rom-com heroine, who is, as advertised, both super hot and an agent of abject chaos, her life and habits and relationships in perpetual ruins.The pleasure of “Eileen” is that its titular protagonist is all of these and none of them: repellent, bitter, repressed and in search of liberation that arrives in a decidedly unsexy manner. In some ways the story is familiar — small-town girl with a terrible life yearns to break free, and meets someone who represents that freedom — but it’s all filtered through a dirty mirror, a noir with shmutz rubbed onto the lens. Eileen’s unpleasantness is also her appeal; this girl certainly is no boss, she’s incapable of rousing speeches, and she’s never going to mutate into a heroine. She is, in other words, familiar.The movie she’s in is a psychosexual thriller, kind of. Ottessa Moshfegh, along with Luke Goebel, adapted Moshfegh’s 2015 novel into a screenplay that’s relatively faithful to the original, but with a few key twists that ensure tension for viewers who’ve read the book. Yet the outlines remain the same: It is the early 1960s, and Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father in some gray, nameless New England town. Eileen’s clerical job at the local boys’ correctional center is stultifying and upsetting, or it would be if Eileen, who is in her mid-20s, could muster the ability to be upset anymore. (“Everyone’s kinda angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” she tells someone.)One day right before Christmas, the new prison counselor turns up, a pulled-together platinum blonde named Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) who seems to have floated in from another dimension. She’s educated, she jokes with the staff and she dresses in a way that emphasizes her curves. Rebecca is comfortable in the world in a way Eileen finds magnetizing. Swiftly, Rebecca becomes her center of gravity, the encapsulation of her dreams. It’s the sort of infatuation a teenager might develop, somewhere between wanting a person and wanting to be a person, but with Rebecca around, Eileen’s bloodless life is injected with sudden fire, and danger, too.McKenzie’s accent is a bit wobblier than Hathaway’s, but once you’re over that hump, the pair are thrilling together. McKenzie plays Eileen as a wide-eyed girl in arrested development who might have been an ingénue if she’d ever had a moment to sparkle. Instead her flat affect, which on someone else might be mysterious and intriguing, turns her invisible. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candor, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”So Rebecca, whom Eileen’s father would probably term a “dame” (or maybe a “hussy”), comes like a bolt from the frigid blue, though more sophisticated eyes than Eileen’s can detect some kind of performativity in her self-presentation. She is, after all, a female Harvard graduate (not, she emphasizes, Radcliffe) in early ’60s New England. She’s been educated with men and now works in a prison for boys and seems perfectly comfortable taunting men in a dive bar. She’s developed a kind of bombshell casing, for reasons unknown but easy to guess at. Hathaway’s performance is pure Hollywood siren wrapped in a wool skirt suit. What she is hiding, her motivations — that’s all opaque, and despite a veneer of vulnerability, there’s something just a little seedy about her.These sorts of women, off-putting and maddeningly erratic, tied to the physical in a way that makes others uneasy, are familiar territory for Moshfegh. She’s perhaps best known for her 2018 novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman who in response to grief develops an addiction to sleeping pills and their accompanying twilight state. In Moshfegh’s imagination, emotional states are signaled by bodily obsessions viewed with disapproval in polite society. For Eileen, this manifests in compulsive behavior: masturbating while spying on a couple in a car, only to stuff snow down her tights to stifle the impulse, or chewing candies and spitting them back out by the bowlful, in an attempt to control her body size. (In the novel, she’s also scatologically fixated, downing laxatives and frequently commenting on fecal matters; the film, perhaps necessarily, carves this part away.)But the story is also a perfect pairing for its director, William Oldroyd, whose previous film, the 2017 thriller “Lady Macbeth,” introduced Florence Pugh to the world. Oldroyd’s cold but keen eye for women pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown by boorish, violent men meets rich ground here. Not just Eileen, but Rebecca and several other female characters are not good or angelic women, and yet they’ve clearly bent themselves to fit molds made by men. The film’s titles, its grain, its shots that bathe Rebecca and Eileen in glowy red lights and deep shadows — it’s all meant to evoke the period, but also an era where women like these fit in like a wrong-handed glove.All of this adds up to discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. Unlike this year’s big movies about women breaking free from oppressive circumstances — the aforementioned “Barbie,” the forthcoming “Poor Things,” among others — it is not obvious that Eileen is destined to find a fuller, richer life free from the confines of patriarchy. She may not be the kind of person who really can. She is, in fact, rather ordinary, not — to return to her father’s statement — the kind of person who’s in a movie, who makes decisions and does things.Except, of course, she’s the lead of her own movie now. Refusing to make Eileen into a girlboss or a heroine or even an example is what makes the whole thing so delicious, so cathartic, so strangely realistic, even if the viewer is left a little horrified. “Eileen” is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.EileenRated R. A whole lot of nasty business. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘She Came to Me’ Review: A Sea of Troubles (the Romantic Kind)

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      A love-triangle comedy from Rebecca Miller, starring Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei and Anne Hathaway, gets an emotional boost from an unexpected source.There’s a scene in “She Came to Me,” the writer-director Rebecca Miller’s juggling act of a romantic comedy, that sounds like the setup of a joke: An opera composer and a tugboat skipper walk into a Brooklyn dive bar. The composer’s wife, a psychiatrist, is back at their brownstone. But for the blocked composer, Steven (Peter Dinklage), his wife, Patricia (Anne Hathaway), and his seafaring muse, Katrina (Marisa Tomei), what happens next is hardly a laughing matter.The unexpected liaison cures Steven’s writer’s block. It also provides an object for Katrina’s affection — or, rather, affliction. “I’m addicted to romance,” she tells Steven, revealing an anomaly in her otherwise independent personality. As for Patricia, she’s got her own compulsions. This is a romantic triangle that may recall the screwball of a Nancy Meyers rom-com.Buoyed by a score from Bryce Dessner of the rock band the National, an original Bruce Springsteen song and the expert performances of its all-in ensemble, the film also casts a luminous aura around a first love, that of two high schoolers, Julian (Evan Ellison) and Tereza (Harlow Jane). He’s Patricia’s son and Steven’s stepson; she’s the daughter of their housekeeper, Magdalena (Joanna Kulig in a soulful turn). Tereza’s stepfather, Trey (Brian d’Arcy James), is a persnickety Civil War re-enactor and a court reporter.The teenagers’ relationship hits serious snags, through no fault of their own. Age plays a part, but so does class and Julian’s race; he identifies as Black. Amid the roiling neuroses of the adults, the young beloveds provide the film with a surprising emotional ballast.She Came to MeRated R for salty language. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Armageddon Time’ Review: Hard Lessons About Life in America

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      New York in 1980 is the setting for James Gray’s brooding, bittersweet story of family conflict and interracial friendship.Can you remember the first day of sixth grade? Would you even want to? James Gray, in the opening scene of “Armageddon Time,” his tender and lacerating new film, brings it all back with clammy precision.We are at Public School 173 in Queens, New York, at our desks in Mr. Turkeltaub’s class. It’s 1980 — maybe you’re old enough to remember that, too — and two boys are about to get in trouble, one for mouthing off during roll call and the other for drawing a picture of the teacher (Andrew Polk) with the body of a turkey. It seems like if your name was Turkeltaub and you taught sixth grade you might be able to take the joke, but on the other hand, maybe not being able to take the joke is the whole reason you’re teaching sixth grade in the first place. This is a man, after all, whose job requires him to utter the words “gym is a privilege, people” with a straight face.“Armageddon Time” isn’t about Mr. Turkeltaub, though his contempt for his students helps to propel its plot. It’s not about gym class either, but it is — astutely, uncomfortably and in the end tragically — about privilege.The two troublemakers — Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb) and Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) — become friends, bonded by their dislike of Turkey (as they call him when he’s out of earshot) and also by the kind of shared interests that connect boys on the edge of adolescence. For all their rebellious bravado in Turkey’s class, there is still something childlike in the way Johnny and Paul approach the world, and a sweet softness in the mannerisms of the young actors who play them.Johnny collects NASA mission patches and dreams of becoming an astronaut. Paul thinks the Beatles will get back together soon. He also tells Johnny — matter-of-factly rather than boastfully — that his family is “super rich.” This isn’t quite true. Paul’s father, Irving (Jeremy Strong), is a boiler repairman. His mother, Esther (Anne Hathaway), is a home-economics teacher and P.T.A. officer who is considering a run for the local school board. With help from Esther’s parents (Anthony Hopkins and Tovah Feldshuh), they are sending Paul’s older brother, Ted (Ryan Sell), to private school, where Paul will eventually join him.In a fairly short time — between the start of school and Thanksgiving, with the election of Ronald Reagan in between — Paul will arrive at a clearer, harsher understanding of how power, status and money work in America, a lesson that will come at Johnny’s expense.Johnny is Black, Paul is white, and even as they navigate the world together, they experience it in different ways. Mr. Turkeltaub may punish them both, but he is much harder on Johnny, calling him an “animal” and ridiculing him in front of his peers. Johnny, who lives with his grandmother, is one of a small number of Black students at the school, and their presence alarms some of the ostensibly tolerant adults in Paul’s family.Interracial friendship is an old and complicated theme in American culture. Think of Ishmael and Queequeg bedded down at the Spouter-Inn in “Moby-Dick,” Huck and Jim adrift on the Mississippi in “Huckleberry Finn” or Dylan and Mingus tagging up Brooklyn in Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude.” In almost every case, the white character’s perception is central (these books are all first-person narratives, and in a palpable if not literal sense, “Armageddon Time” is too). The Black character, however brave, beautiful or tragic he may be, is the vehicle of his companion’s moral awakening.“Armageddon Time” plants itself in this tradition, but it is also honest about the limitations of its own perspective. Gray tells the story of Paul’s discovery of the iniquities of race and class, but doesn’t pretend that this painful knowledge might redeem him, much less rescue Johnny.Nor does the cruelty of American racism come as news — certainly not to Johnny, and not in the Graff household either. They are Jews whose ascent into the American middle class is shadowed by generational memories of Cossacks and Nazis in the old world and less lethal brushes with antisemitism in their new home.Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong in the film as Paul’s parents, Esther and Irving Graff.Anne Joyce/Focus FeaturesThe moral center of the clan is Esther’s father, Aaron, who has a special fondness for Paul. He’s a gentle, playful, didactic presence in the boy’s life — Hopkins finds the essential grit hiding underneath the twinkle — dispensing gifts and jokes and hard nuggets of wisdom. He’s a comforting presence for Paul, who is terrified of Irving’s violent temper and at an awkward stage in his relationship with Esther.Gray’s filmography — he has directed and written eight features so far, starting with “Little Odessa” in 1995 — can be understood as a series of inquiries into the meaning of home, which is usually somewhere in the outer boroughs of New York. After venturing further afield in his last two movies (the Amazon in “The Lost City of Z” and outer space in “Ad Astra”), he has swerved into deeply personal territory.But even as Paul Graff is an unmistakable alter ego, his situation is a version of the predicament faced by the young men played by Joaquin Phoenix in “We Own the Night” and “Two Lovers.” His curiosity may push him toward rebellion, adventure and the testing of taboos, but at the same time he is entangled in the warm, sticky tendrils of family obligation and tribal identity.Gray surveys the Graff household with an eye that is both affectionate and critical. (The eye of the director of photography, Darius Khondji, finds the precise colors of coziness and claustrophobia, and the subtle shades of nostalgia and remorse.) A different filmmaker might have made Esther, Irving and Aaron avatars of liberal hypocrisy. They despise Reagan and root for the underdogs. They also send Ted and Paul to a school whose major benefactors include the Trump family, and drop toxic morsels of bigotry into their table talk.But “Armageddon Time” is less interested in cataloging their moral failings than in investigating the contradictions they inhabit, the swirl of mixed messages and ethical compromises that define Paul’s emerging sense of the world and his place in it. He hears a lot — including from one of the Trumps — about hard work and independence, and also about the importance of connections. He is told that the game is rigged against him, and also that it’s rigged in his favor. He’s instructed to fit in and to fight back, to follow his dreams and to be realistic.And Johnny? The messages he receives are much more brutal, though hardly less confusing. But what happens to him can only be guessed, by Paul and the audience, because one of the lessons Paul learns is that his friend’s story was never his to tell.Armageddon TimeRated R. Bad feelings, bad behavior, bad language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Locked Down’ Review: In Quarantine, Misery Hates Company

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Locked Down’ Review: In Quarantine, Misery Hates CompanyAnne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a couple sheltering in their London brownstone over the early weeks of the pandemic in this irritating heist comedy.Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor in “Locked Down.”Credit…Susan Allnutt/HBO MaxJan. 14, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETLocked DownDirected by Doug LimanComedy, Crime, RomanceR1h 58mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.A London couple endures the most mundane of Covid-19 miseries in “Locked Down,” a desultory comedy set in the early weeks of the pandemic.The story centers on Linda (Anne Hathaway) and Paxton (Chiwetel Ejiofor), longtime romantic partners who suffer the trials, nay, the tortures of a life in lockdown: Zoom calls, pajama pants, cigarettes indoors. Linda whines about feeling listless; Paxton, in a marathon of poor taste, calls neighbors “fellow inmates” and jokes about suicide. Despite cohabitating, the couple has recently split up, and they avoid each other by working and sleeping in separate, lavish bedrooms in their multistory brownstone.The film, directed by Doug Liman (“Mr. & Mrs. Smith”) and streaming on HBO Max, perks up halfway through, once Linda and Paxton each receive a work assignment to retrieve a 3 million pound diamond from Harrods for a wealthy client. The ordinarily law-abiding pair find themselves at a crossroads. Should they risk it all to pocket the diamond, sell it for cash and free their minds from bourgeois malaise?[embedded content]Shot in the fall under pandemic protocols, “Locked Down” has a charming low-fi quality. Many sequences unfold on screens, as Linda and Paxton chat with colleagues or vent to friends over video calls. Ben Kingsley, as Paxton’s manager, and Ben Stiller, as Linda’s boss, appear only virtually, and Liman succeeds in milking the actors’ remote comic timing.But mostly, the film already feels like a relic. Its pandemic jokes — toilet paper hoarders, Zoom freezes — wore thin by summer. We’re meant to identify with Linda and Paxton, to laugh knowingly as the pair descend into isolation-induced hysteria. Instead, the film evokes the era of the cursed “Imagine” video, when celebrities deemed the coronavirus a great equalizer while groaning about going stir-crazy at their villas. Like that Instagram misfire, the best that “Locked Down” has to offer, at least while we remain in the throes of a deadly crisis, is a window into a luxurious space to quarantine.Locked DownRated R. Running time 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on HBO Max.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More