Film Review: AMERICAN FICTION 

• A24 Films

Here's a bit of a poser: Is it possible for a movie to be too good at what it's trying to do? That's no mere hypothetical in the case of American Fiction, writer/director Cord Jefferson's adaptation of Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure. On the one hand, it's a pointed satire of the idea that that when it comes to popular culture, there is only one kind of story about the "Black American experience" that's treated as legitimate. Yet it's also a drama that offers a very particular alternative to that narrative. And every time it headed back in the direction of that satire, I found myself wishing it could just be about the thing it was telling me people don't want it to be about.

That notion gets offered up through the life and professional work of Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a novelist and university faculty member who keeps finding that there doesn't appear to be a market for his literary writing, not when his mythology-steeped narratives keep getting filed in bookstores under "African American Studies" just because he happens to be Black, and when the zeitgeist-y breakout work dealing with Black characters is a book titled We's Lives in Da Ghetto. During a forced leave from work after a contentious encounter with a snowflake-y student, Monk heads to Boston to reconnect with the family from whom he's become somewhat estranged: his widowed mother (Leslie Uggams), sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown).

As it happens, the issues facing this family are ... substantial. In addition to Monk's professional crisis of confidence, the siblings are dealing with increasing evidence that their mother will need memory care, which they're not sure they're going to be able to afford. Both Lisa and Cliff are recently divorced, and Cliff's life is in particular upheaval as he deals with coming out as gay in middle age. That's on top of the generally complicated interactions resulting from their respective experience with their father, who took his own life and whose secrets Monk is only just discovering.

It's all wonderfully rich material—the kind that any good writer could mine for great fiction, making Monk's sense that such avenues aren't open to him even more maddening—and Jefferson gives those scenes a punch by letting the fantastic cast loose to do their best. Wright and Brown are particular standouts, with the latter nailing Cliff's mix of suppressed rage at having denied his real self for so long, and the occasionally irresponsible fallout of suddenly indulging that real self. As a family drama bursting with rich characterizations and terrific performances, American Fiction is consistently terrific.

The irony is that you probably wouldn't know about any of this based on the logline which is, quite understandably, being used to sell American Fiction. Because Monk decides to make a point by writing under a pseudonym an exaggerated parody of the kind of "urban" story everyone seems to expect from a Black writer—one that he initially titles My Pafology before opting for the even more ridiculously blunt title Fuck. And Fuck suddenly becomes a sensation, all based on the escaped-convict alter-ego created by Monk as the book's author, leading to movie options and the potential for book awards (including one that Monk himself finds himself on the jury deciding).

Jefferson handles all of this material effectively as well, including the scene in which Monk visualizes the overblown story he's creating, and his increasingly complicated interactions with the author of We's Lives in Da Ghetto (Issa Rae). Wright makes the most of every nuance of Monk's complex character, as someone finally finding success in a way he despises. The only problem is that this satire keeps pulling American Fiction away from a wonderful story.

That, indeed, is the point of American Fiction: How many wonderful stories aren't we getting, simply because of the limited creative parameters granted to certain artists? The parts of this movie that I only like are the ones the keep reminding me why it can't just be about the parts of this movie that I love. That's a pretty bitter pill to swallow, when the comedy in a movie only stings because it's so effective at clarifying why that comedy shouldn't have to exist.