American Fiction (2023)

In this masterful comedy-drama, a troubled Black novelist battles to save his soul

Jeffrey Wright is transfixing as Monk, a writer whose identity slips from his grasp

American Fiction (2023)

In theaters

A philosopher/psychologist – I forget who; surely the observation wasn’t his alone – once gave his readers a daunting personal challenge.

Get these three in alignment:  who you think you are; who you say you are; and who you are.

In the shockingly funny, indelibly sad American Fiction we meet Thelonius (“Monk”) Ellison, a middle-aged intellectual headed for a pitch-black crisis.

He thinks he’s a serious Black novelist, and his well-regarded books seem to prove it.

He can say to the world that he’s a dedicated literary craftsman, never mind that none of his books has turned a profit.

But who he is teeters in the balance, and we watch as his cobbled together life and career tip into free fall.

Anxious to learn whether his agent has sold his latest novel, Monk screams at and torments his students at the California university where he teaches (blithely suggesting to one of them that his parents are likely Nazi sympathizers).

With student complaints about Monk’s nasty temper mounting, the English Department chairman orders him to take a leave of absence.  Power down.  Chill out.

When Monk learns that his new novel, ten years in the making, has been rejected by his current publisher, getting out of town feels like blessed relief.

Mad, scared for his career and confused about his life, he flees L.A. for Boston to be with his family.  Alas, it seems there’s no respite there.  “Estranged” barely describes the distance between the author and his relatives.

Writer-director Cord Jefferson clearly believes that what’s true for Monk goes for all of us.

We live both inside and outside our heads.  Reality leaps up from the skull beneath the skin, and the boundary between life and the life of the mind is bafflingly blurred.

Monk is at a personal and intellectual crossroad.  Luckily for us, he’s flawlessly, jumpily, mercilessly lived in by Jeffrey Wright.

The actor’s long, distinctive list of stage, television and movie credits foretold as much, not that anyone could have seen this deeply felt, furiously intelligent performance coming.

I first saw the young Wright in 1993 on Broadway as the biting, unapologetically gay nurse Belize in Tony Kushner’s galvanic play Angels in America.

That night I thought I’d spotted an actor who could never be typecast, and, true to his winding, varied career since then, in American Fiction Wright is a broken, anguished, shifty chameleon.

In playing Monk, his first lead role, he blends “scared”, “furious” and “intelligent” with an elegance and precision I haven’t seen before in a major American movie performance.

Monk loses his bearings, but his mind is always at the forefront of our gaze. The writer stumbles, but Wright’s eyes are always clear windows into Monk’s troubled soul.

“Complex” doesn’t begin to cover all that’s plaguing Monk, but Wright the actor, working from writer-director Cord Jefferson’s acidly funny script, doesn’t let him wriggle away from us.

Monk is by turns honest, snobbish, cruel, kind, angry and sad.  And not entirely on to himself.  He fails to recognize that the wicked imp of his self-destruction is about to spring.

Monk reconnecting with his mother (Leslie Uggams) and sister (Tracee Ellis Ross)

When he’s reunited with his family in Boston, and at their vacation home on the Massachusetts coast, Monk’s self-protective instincts begin to fray.

His patient sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) reminds him he’s always kept himself apart, never sitting still for caring conversations about family.  Egotistically, like their suicidal father, he’s long retreated into himself.

When Lisa suddenly dies of a heart attack, Monk must step up and get proper care for their aging mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams). Her forgetfulness and mental lapses, a doctor informs him, are signs of impending dementia.

His brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), a plastic surgeon and divorced father who’s lately come out as gay, flies in from Tucson for Lisa’s funeral.

Now a coke-snorting hedonist exploring his newly liberated sex life, once Lisa’s ashes have been cast on water, Cliff promptly blasts Monk for his continual aloofness.  As for their mother’s care, Monk will just have to figure something out.

But not everything in Monk’s world is haywire.  Coraline (Erika Alexander), a seacoast neighbor who’s read one of Monk’s novels, is intrigued.

After they chat, she reads another one and they become warm hookup partners. This could get serious.  Monk isn’t remotely sure he’s ready.

By reading his books, Coraline (Erika Alexander) slyly warms up the frosty Monk

Bewilderments keep piling up.  At a literary conference Monk, the barely known, little-read “distinguished author”, is dumbfounded when he sees a packed multiracial audience give a standing O to Black novelist Sintara Golden (Issa Rae).

Her blaxploitation novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto is a smash hit.  Later, face to face, Monk condescends to her crookedly “ghettoized” writing.

Neatly parrying, Sintara points out that (1) Monk doesn’t denounce white male writers who portray gritty settings and use rough language; (2) she carefully researches her books; and (3) she understands what the market demands, reaching the wide readership that doesn’t even know Monk exists.

A seething Monk rages to his agent Arthur (John Ortiz) that he’s fed up.  Black stereotypes – absent fathers, unwed mothers, drug-fueled violence – are filling contemporary novels with a grossly incomplete picture of Black American life.

To expose the publishing industry’s cynical spread of one-dimensional Black images, he plots a counter move.  Of course, it’s all a joke, he tells himself.

Writing under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh”, he concocts an outrageously coarse novel, mockingly titled My Pafology.

In one of the movie’s most inventive scenes, at night, as Monk types at his computer, his characters come to life in the room, speaking the lines he’s writing, sometimes pausing to ask him what they should say next.

It’s a small moviemaking gem, with the medium turned in on itself, just as Monk’s life is turning against him, and he’s losing sight of the self-harm he’s setting in motion. Toward the movie’s climax, it will again turn on itself like a snake swallowing its tail.

Jefferson clearly believes that what’s true for Monk goes for all of us. We live both inside and outside our heads.  Reality leaps up from the skull beneath the skin, and the boundary between life and the life of the mind is bafflingly blurred.

Monk is sure his sham novel’s crude characters and over the top violence, written with an artfully faked “street” vibe, will tease and titillate publishers – who’ll surely turn the book down, giving Monk the last laugh.

Is he in for a surprise.  Immediately after Arthur reluctantly submits the manuscript, the novel is accepted.  Its grinning white publishers are determined to make it a bestseller, and a multi-million-dollar movie deal quickly follows.

Embarrassed that his “joke” has spun out of control, he’s suddenly forced to hide his real identity.  He’s styled the invented “author” Stagg R. Leigh as a wanted criminal, and in an interview with the producer of the proposed movie, he needs to take on the identity of a hardened street tough.

Monk hasn’t bargained on having transformed himself in the public mind, nor is he ready for a media environment itching to learn more about the raw, unexpectedly talented Stagg R. Leigh.

In his astonishingly assured directorial debut, Jefferson bridges the gaps between satire, pathos and lurking violence in a way that’s both hilarious and mind-rattling.

He’s written successfully for television, and his screenplay here (adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure) gets the two-hour run time overflowing with complex lives and lingering questions.

Sterling K. Brown is the unhinged, truth-spouting Cliff, who pierces Monk’s aloofness

One abiding mystery surrounds Cliff.  In Brown’s aching, riotously comic performance, we wonder if this sensitive man’s reconfigured life will ever give him sexual or emotional peace.

Another conundrum is whether Cliff and Monk will be able to reconcile and ease their mother into a dignified old age.

And overarching all the movie’s concerns, most urgently, Jefferson is asking whether Monk, or any serious Black writer, can be both popular and honest.  And will publishers and Hollywood know or care about the difference?

In the end, we’re left to ponder how Monk’s new life will unfold.  Stagg R. Leigh the invented criminal and Monk the re-invented writer merge, so we get an elusive, mixed resolution.

It’s fitting and delightful that the jazz-inflected score is cheeky and playful in the manner of the real Thelonius Monk.  And under the closing credits it’s a treat to soak up Miles Davis’ gorgeous, elegiac trumpet on “Autumn Leaves”.

That cut, from Cannonball Adderley’s 1958 album Somethin’ Else, is the only time Miles, once he’d become famous, guest performed on another artist’s album.  Like Miles and the real Monk, this movie’s Monk struggles to forge his own path.

Genuine individualism, not any ideology, gives this wild tale its underlying, driving force.

Jefferson’s twisty, heart-stopping storytelling bends our expectations in more than one direction.  We still can’t be sure who Monk the man and writer – suddenly, hilariously, inexplicably on top – actually is.  Neither, we suspect, can he.