“It was a Black and blackly night…”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: as a lifelong lover of satire, I was annoyed at missing American Fiction when it played the Heartland Film Festival months ahead of the current Oscar season, but its one and only showtime and location were lousy for me. The drive would’ve been a nearly-hourlong construction-zone slog to Central Indiana’s most upscale area, arguably a breeding ground for the very crowd that the film’s most withering commentary targets.

The original work was a 2001 novel by Percival Elliott called Erasure that I hadn’t heard of but have now added to my want-list, adapted here by first-time director Cord Jefferson, whose choice TV-writing credits include Succession, HBO’s Watchmen, and The Good Place. Our hero is Jeffrey Wright as college professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose writings and temperament are more Harlan than Ralph. His most self-cherished works appear to be modern reboots of the ancient playwrights, Aeschylus and Aristophanes and the like. Somehow his proud efforts that “don’t see color” (his own exact words!) aren’t burning up the literary sales charts. He has no interest in capitalizing on The Black Experience and flies off the handle when he finds his hoity-toity non-starters shelved in a bookshop’s single “African-American Literature” bookcase even though there’s nothing Black inside them. He huffs and puffs because of course his babies are great art and it’s the children who are wrong.

When he sees other Black authors getting recognized for their ghetto memoirs – some of whom are in upper-crust academia, same as him – he has had it and decides to write his own to mock them. His well-to-do Boston upbringing, in a family that was once rich enough to afford a separate vacation house but not enough to purchase LTC insurance, gives him exactly zero personal anecdotes to use, in a world where a TV channel’s Black History Month celebration slate ranges from slavery dramas to Boyz N The Hood…and that’s it, that’s their whole marathon. So he fakes it till he makes it, by setting out to write the worst Black memoir of all times.

Monk not only creates a crappy pseudonym, but has to fabricate an entire persona to prop it up — a tough-mewling faux-fugitive on the lam, about as convincing in person as Michael Scott’s “Prison Mike” character, or Eddie Murphy as prison-poet Tyrone Green in that one classic SNL sketch that’s totally a forefather to all of this. (“Kill my landlord! Kill my landlord!”) But over a conference call with a prospective publisher on the high end of the Sherwin-Williams white spectrum, he’s plenty “real”, at least as “real” as Vanilla Ice. A multi-million-dollar deal is struck and he’s on his way to bestselling flash-in-the-pan-dom, to his abject disgust. Every time he tries to sabotage the deal by doing something even stupider or more offensive, that only makes his “brand” even more “real”. And in today’s world, “real” outsells real, even if the literati can’t tell or care which is which.

But the film isn’t just its satire, which covers half the runtime at most. Among its best, most unsung strengths is its ensemble, the family that Monk sucks at acknowledging. Monk’s sister Lisa (Black-ish‘s Tracee Ellis Ross) is everyone’s witty bedrock who does not put up with his nonsense. His brother Cliff (This Is Us‘ Sterling K. Brown) has split from his wife and kids after being caught with another man. His elderly mom (Tony Award Winner Leslie Uggams, from the stage and Deadpool) is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and bringing the entire family to a major decision point. Others come and go as Monk’s story continues, but a lot of character setup (far more than you’d normally get in a film that’s only a satire) pays off in more sincere ways as each of the main cast is allowed their own personal story. Some are much longer than others, but none of them are compelled to pose as the ne plus ultra of The Black Experience. They’re large, they contain multitudes, etc.

It’s amid Mom’s crisis that Monk has to deal with his dilemma. He’s become the very thing he hates, but he could really use the money to help his mom. As if things couldn’t get more complicated and sitcom-eriffic, then Monk — the professor himself, not his 2 Black 2 Strong cosplay — is asked to join the judges’ panel of a Major Book Award. The selection-committee head (J.C. MacKenzie, a veteran of five Scorsese films and The Trial of the Chicago 7) doesn’t even hide the fact that they’re looking for nonwhite faces to look less racist, and sweetens the pot by offering a stipend and, unambiguously, the chance to judge fellow authors “not just figuratively”. Here all this time Monk’s been giving away his Frasier Crane-ish judgments for free, like a chump. We sit back, check our watches, and see how many minutes till he’s faced with the prospect of judging his own book.

American Fiction‘s terrain is uncommon yet familiar to anyone who loved Get Out or made time for Radha Blank’s 2020 Netflix film The 40-Year-Old Version: puncturing the pretensions of a hermetic circle in which white authorities “listen” to unheard Black voices that all sound alike to them, signal-boost the ones that feel most “authentic” by their flawed criteria, and keep clutching the bandwagon reins as they reap the rewards and congratulate each other for defeating racism and getting rich, not necessarily in that order. (And yes, I’m well aware of the ironic danger in maybe whitely doing the same thing, so you needn’t point it out. I promise I’m neither getting rich nor preening for cliques here.)

A few choice barbs are also directed at such spotlighted authors, some of whom may be motivated less by true-trauma confessions and more by a book-buying audience hooked on “poverty porn”. That’s a critical yet secondary objective alongside the main commentary track, which maxes out at a pivotal scene in which the white lady who heads the judges’ panel lets its two Black voices have their say for as long as they need, right before the white majority overrules them. Such is American Fiction life.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: That other Black-lit judge in the room is Issa Rae (Barbie, Across the Spider-Verse), a fellow intellectual and market-minded author of the latest sensation We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. Other players in the lit-biz include John Ortiz (the fifth and sixth Fast/Furious, Kong: Skull Island) as Monk’s agent, who does not miss his client’s low-selling days; Miriam Shor (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, et al) as the publisher who thinks the book is peak Black; and Michael Cyril Creighton (Spotlight, Game Night), who considers do-rags a must-have accessory for every Black memoirist’s book-flap photo.

Erika Alexander (Get Out, The Cosby Show) is a lawyer named Caroline, who leans into that beloved trope from every rom-com about a failed writer, The Romantic Interest Who’s Actually Read His Books That No One Else Has. Adam Brody (The OC, Shazam!) is a Hollywood producer interested in adapting his book into Black Movie gold. Myra Lucretia Taylor (The Big Sick, Changing Lanes) is Lorraine, Mom’s longtime caretaker, who has to figure out what comes next for herself. The always recognizable character actor Patrick Fischler (Mad Men! Angel! Barry! More more more!) is a hypersensitive collegiate colleague.

Alas, only a single scene is given to special guests Keith David (insert, like, hundreds of credits here) and Okieriete Onaodowan (from the original cast of Hamilton), appearing as the imaginary leads of Monk’s fake book. Each man gives their all to the undignified stereotypes he’s sketching, but they have to keep stopping and waiting for Monk to churn out their atrocious dialogue. It takes him time to think outside his box.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the American Fiction end credits, but once it’s done, you can move on to the exact polar opposite Best Picture nominee — a massively budgeted, A-List-bejeweled, historical drama about horrors perpetrated against an entire nonwhite community that pointedly keeps The White Experience front and center: Killers of the Flower Moon. Catch it now as part of your personal Oscar Quest or save it to watch with the whole family next October on Indigenous Peoples’ Day!