Some have taken Gray’s intentions in this regard as motivated by white ethnic guilt, interpreting his forthright depiction of Paul’s failure to act on behalf of Johnny at the film’s decisive moment as a mea culpa. Yet what this film attempts is something tougher and more productively honest than that: to lay bare the extent to which most people simultaneously pay into and benefit from the very system that oppresses them. [It] is a film of and about decency, how to ignite it and preserve it in ourselves, and encourage it in each other, against the prevailing, bullying spirit of our times.
— Edo Choi (Reverse Shot)
The key question of Gray’s semi-roman à clef […] is not whether it’s accomplished, but whether it fills [its] grandiose conceit. What, if anything, do the adventures of a gifted but wayward wannabe artist have to do with a society’s encroaching rightward tilt? Does Gray earnestly conflating the ethical struggles of his youthful surrogate with the state of the nation suggest humility, hubris, or something even more outrageously overwrought?
— Adam Nayman (The Ringer)
Synopsis: In 1980, Queens, New York, a young Jewish boy befriends a rebellious African-American classmate to the disapproval of his privileged family and begins to reckon with growing up in a world of inequality and prejudice.