Black, Not Like Me

Truth or lies? American Fiction gives you both. A satire full of righteous rage, a drama soaked in bitter humor and the promise of radiant love, Cord Jefferson’s film, based on the book Erasure by Percival Everett, is a full-hearted portrait of life in all its contradictions. How best to talk about the flawed nature of stories—and the very human frailties of storytellers—than through the redeeming power of storytelling?

AMERICAN FICTION ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Cord Jefferson
Written by: Cord Jefferson
Starring: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown
Running time: 117 mins

American Fiction works so well because of this paradox, starting with the fact that it’s a dead-serious comedy about a self-serious author named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright). He’s a prickly professor at a woke Los Angeles university where white students walk out of his lit classes in protest when he teaches anything with the N-word. He’s an African American who is also a novelist—but don’t call him an African-American novelist. And definitely don’t put his works in the African American section at Barnes and Noble. He rejects allowing people to define him by his race, even though everyone around him keeps rejecting his rejection.

Urging him to take some time off, the university encourages Monk to attend a literary seminar in Boston, his hometown, and maybe even reconnect with family while he’s there. What drives him nuts is the featured speaker at the seminar: Sinatra Golden (Issa Rae), author of the New York Times bestseller We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. She’s an accomplished liberal arts graduate who worked in Manhattan publishing houses before she hit the big time with her book about the inner lives of inner-city women—or what Monk considers a cliché-riddled ride into the worst black stereotypes, Ebonics and all.

His own well-educated life is free of what he sees as lazy caricatures, as is his family, including physician sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), estranged plastic surgeon brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), and erudite matriarch Agnes (Leslie Uggams), her dignity eroded by the onset of Alzheimer’s. But tragedy strikes during his East Coast visit, and suddenly he needs to step up and help the family. Desperate times dovetail with his creative frustration, and the result is a ghetto-wallowing screed he types out in a booze-fueled stupor and calls My Pafology. Monk writes it as a grim joke; publishers love it and want to pay him $750,000 for the rights.

Now what? Monk wants to shut down the whole scam. Mounting family bills make him reconsider. The ruse leads to a pseudonym—Stagg R. Leigh—and an alias as an escaped convict. The public eats it up. “I’m sure white people in the Hamptons will love it,” Monk grunts via speakerphone in his best ’hood patois. “They will!” says his bleeding-heart opportunist publisher, giddy with excitement. In a fuck-you fit of pique, he even changes the book’s name to Fuck. It just makes the literati want it even more.

No good deed goes unpunished: Monk, having been invited to be a juror for a prestigious literary award—mainly because of a minority-inclusion push—now finds his publisher submitting Fuck for the prize. “I am thrilled to read a BIPOC man harmed by our carceral state,” says one of his fellow jurors—white, of course. And Monk’s increasing circles of Hell only deepen.

American Fiction refracts so many insights about our current culture—virtue-signaling gestures from people who continue being blithely racist, opportunistic exploitation of market forces, a genuine impulse to tell underprivileged stories. But it also paints a painfully realistic picture of family strife—the cutting slights, the outright rejections, the callous blind eye to genuine anguish. Craig, who blew up his married life after coming out as gay and now relishes his newfound demolition mode, is a particularly effective soothsayer—calling out Monk’s stubborn misanthropy, haughty disdain of those around him, and repressed need for affection. Craig also hurts the most out of all of them, probably because he most wants to love and be loved for who he really is.

This finely-wrought film doesn’t quite stick the landing, with a head-feint ending that wants to satisfy all possible resolutions without really committing to a resonant one. This  is a stumble, considering how well Jefferson brings to exuberant life a fully dimensional family that happens to be black, all while satirizing the tropes that our popular imagination assigns to black lives. The struggle, Jefferson seems to say, is parsing the shallow from the deep. The world is what we explain it to be, and our lives are what we describe to others.

Even if we’re honest with ourselves—and that’s a heavy load—fiction is inevitable. It creeps in, embellishes, and distorts. Honesty sometimes couches itself in lies. Falsehoods can reveal painful truths. Monk thinks We’s Lives in Da Ghetto is trauma porn. He’s not wrong. But it’s still someone else’s reality, no matter how much he wants to deny it.