Jonah Naplan   December 30, 2023

First-time director Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” is one of the most brilliant and funny movies of the entire year. It selects elements of modern-day culture, particularly racial stereotypes, and uses them as pointillistic pieces in a thoughtful puzzle that interrogates how the need to be inclusive motivates our society’s choices, even if they’re insincere. From the very first scene, “American Fiction” brings attention to that central idea by having a young woman call out the protagonist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), an author and college professor, for having the N-word scrawled across the white board. Her protests are met with no resolve, and she storms out. She is white. Monk is Black. He sees no reason why she could be so personally offended by the word, since he’s “gotten over it” himself. She sees that as besides the point. This important moment sets the thematic table for everything that will follow, a satire that explores how our feigned desperation to uplift Black voices ultimately yanks them back down again.

The movie is based upon Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, but its personality is so distinctive to the modern age that I can’t imagine it’s that similar to the source material. “American Fiction” must take place today; post-George Floyd riots, post-Trump, and, as a joke made by Monk’s sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) confirms, post-overturning of Roe v. Wade. “American Fiction” is cynical of this world, and so is Monk, a condescending skeptic whose sour attitude probably evolved from his continuous uphill battle to publish his work, despite the media’s infatuation with Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), a fellow Black author who’s profited from her own novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, an amalgamation of every Black stereotype and cliché, exaggerated to their marrow, which has been uproariously praised by the public.

In a moment of intense frustration, Monk bangs out My Pafology, later renamed to Fuck, under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a fugitive of the law who’s just spent twelve years in prison. The book itself is trashy, indignant, and offensive, yet the public, as they did with Golden’s novel, love it; so much so that it’s submitted as a contender for the literary awards of which Monk himself is a judge. While Stagg R. Leigh gains such appraisal, the real man behind the facade is trudging through life and family troubles. While struggling to reconcile with his brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) and being there for his girlfriend Coraline (Erika Alexander), his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) is developing the onset of Alzheimer’s, turning the kindly Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor) into the family’s sort of maternal stand-in, while she develops a romance of her own with the gentlemanly Maynard (Raymond Anthony Thomas).

One of the only problems with “American Fiction” is that imbalance; the meta-commentary on racial implications in our media juxtaposed beside Monk’s family drama. Both plots are interesting in and of themselves, but they don’t mesh together particularly well, especially as each begins to run on its own track with individual twists, turns, and resolutions. The film works as well as it does because of a wonderfully nuanced lead performance from Jeffrey Wright who takes all the sarcasm, jealousy, and regret of his character and spins it into something really memorable, which makes him a top contender for this year’s Academy Awards. The man is not an inherently likable character—we only warm up to him because we know he means well, and because Wright displays such an exuberant elasticity that allows him to disappear into a role an inferior actor couldn’t tackle with nearly the same gravitas. It’s also because the dialogue he’s been given to say is so introspective and alluring, dissecting his and our role in this very picture.

“American Fiction” is a movie rife with cultural references and a careful consideration of form, which makes it far more accessible than other satires that think they’re way smarter than they actually are, particularly some of those belonging to the infamous “eat the rich” subgenre. This film, in turn, is not so much “eat the white,” as it is, well, “eat everyone.” As much as “American Fiction” criticizes white culture—stereotypes that are, all things considered, considerably exaggerated—it’s constantly examining the spectrum of blackness: What qualifies as Black enough? What is too Black? How artificially Black can we make something before it starts to offend people? 

The script illustrates that maxim by showing society’s impact on two different Ellison brothers; Monk being the more orderly one, who (by comparison) has his life put together, and Clifford being free-sailing and reckless, a druggie who’s aimlessly settled in Tucson—an extra detail that had my screening in Scottsdale roaring. Both are of the same bloodline, but each pursued a completely different path, yet, to the benefit of this film’s thesis, neither of them have been especially successful. It’s truthfully indicative of how we view the culture; those who try to speak up and write stories just as insightful as white authors are subjugated because that’s “out of the ordinary,” while those who stick to the script by reiterating the hurtful stereotypes already tossed around for centuries, indicating that we have reason to believe they are, in fact, relevant, are recognized for their worth and “exceptional contribution to the media.”

Much of what “American Fiction” has to say is heavy-handed, made no less harsh by the way it’s joked about; that’s just a clever device to help us better digest the themes it’s unpacking. By one point or another, the movie is undulating in front of us so obviously it’d take a crash dummy to misinterpret the importance of Monk, his books, and the deceitful world he’s living in. We laugh because we know him, and maybe some of us have even been him. Sure, he’s Black and middle-aged and coping with family trauma, but he’s also a working artist struggling to be seen in a cynical reality that seems to want to censor anything they deem exploitive, and highlight anything they think gives the experience of, to quote the movie, “staring into an open wound.”

“American Fiction” is not only one of the most wildly entertaining and well-written movies of the year, it’s also one of the most important. It grapples with the actions we must take when we aren’t even sure which side of ourselves to believe in, heightened by disagreements between our gut instincts and what the rest of the world thinks and wants for us. It’s only a fun bonus that you might find yourself rolling in the aisle with laughter too.

Now playing in select theaters.