Stream It Or Skip It: ‘American Fiction’ on VOD, a Crackling Satire Brought to Life by a Terrific Jeffrey Wright Performance

American Fiction (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is an Oscar longshot in this year’s race, but it shouldn’t be. Not that we want to lay too much value on silly awards competitions – notably, one of the thorny topics the film addresses – but it’d be nice to see Jeffrey Wright score a best actor trophy for playing an irascible author, and writer/director Cord Jefferson land some best adapted screenplay gold for bringing Percival Everett’s novel Erasure to the screen. Otherwise, the film’s an underdog in the more highly competitive best picture, best score (Laura Karpman) and best supporting actor (Sterling K. Brown) races – perhaps undeservedly, considering American Fiction is easily one of 2023’s best films on all fronts. 

AMERICAN FICTION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A leave of absence. That’s what Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Wright) is facing. And it’s not by choice. He’s an author and English professor who put the n-word on the whiteboard and, despite it being part of a book title and placed in historical context, managed to offend a White student with his pointed rationale. So it goes. At least now he has time to work on his next book, right? Well. He’s struggling. His agent Arthur (John Ortiz) says no publisher wants his novel. “They want a ‘Black’ book,” he says, and Monk retorts, “They have a ‘Black’ book. I’m Black, and it’s my book.” What exactly is a “Black” book, you may ask? At a conference, Monk wanders into a packed room to see Sinatra Golden (Issa Rae) reading an excerpt from her bestseller. Its title? We’s Lives in da Ghetto. The mere existence of literature that reduces the African-American experience to crass stereotypes and “trauma porn” is sandpaper on Monk’s soul. 

Monk isn’t going to write anything like that. No. Never. Never ever ever. His novels have complex characters and no pandering tones. Perhaps he just writes what he knows and as only he knows how, being a man from an upper-middle-class family. His siblings all have doctorates, although Monk’s is the one that doesn’t pay very well – Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) is a fertility doctor, and Cliff (Brown) is a plastic surgeon. Their family grew up with a full-time housekeeper-nanny, Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor). His father is dead, and his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) is ailing, in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. Monk was always the loner of the family; he’s unmarried and prickly and uptight and is fine with living in Los Angeles while everyone else is on the East Coast. He uses his newfound free time to fly back home to Boston to see his mother, but quite suddenly is left caring for her by himself – Lisa passes away unexpectedly and Cliff’s life is in shambles after he came out as gay, leading to divorce and the alienation of his children. 

At least Monk finds a friend and romantic interest in Coraline (Erika Alexander), who lives across from Monk’s family’s seaside beach house. She’s even read one of his books. No, really. He’s sold a few, although he isn’t happy when he goes into a bookstore and sees his novels in the “African-American studies” section; he also isn’t happy to see the massive display afforded to We’s Lives in da Ghetto. So here’s Monk: Out of work. Depressed (as usual? Seems to be). Facing major costs for his mother’s medical care. He sits down at the keyboard and types, “MY PAFOLOGY, by Stagg R. Leigh.” It’s some serious gangsta-hood shit. Guns. Booze in paper bags. Ebonics. All that. He submits it as a joke and of course it sells. For $750k. To White publishers who eat this stuff up. With a movie producer looking to buy the rights for seven figures. And now Monk has to pretend to be Stagg R. Leigh, the wanted fugitive who wrote a book about life on the streets. Oh, he also changed the title. The book is now called F—. Nothing’s gonna stop it now.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Many compare it to Spike Lee’s Bamboozled for its similar conceit, but American Fiction strikes me as subtly singular in its mixture of withering satire and precision drama.

Performance Worth Watching: The cast is across-the-board superlative, anchored by Wright, who’s always pretty great (see: Hold the Dark, Basquiat, etc.), but perhaps has never been better than he is here. 

Memorable Dialogue: Classic Monk: “Listen – I’m not offended that you’ve taken a lover, Cliff. I’m offended, Cliff, that you call it taking a lover.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: There’s absolutely no denying American Fiction’s potency as both a character study and social commentary. Jefferson couches thoughtful family drama within a broadly absurdist satirical concept that nudges carefully right up to the top without going over it – and Wright holds both disparate elements together with a brilliantly conceived character. There’s enough poignant discussion of the Ellison family’s troubled history (stemming from the distant father who Monk idolized) to establish Monk’s outsiderism, and embellish the discomfort he feels when finding himself forced back inside by unfortunate circumstances. In these moments, Wright’s work is embellished significantly by well-written dialogue and the extraordinary chemistry he has with Ross, Alexander and, especially Wright, whose character precariously walks the line between comedy and tragedy.

Monk has become, in the parlance of our times, a gatekeeper. He believes that only he knows what’s real and what’s phony, and he has no qualms about expressing that. Compare that to the White publishers who know that their target audience will eat up “hard” and “gritty” narratives from underrepresented voices, to the tune of significant profits – they’re gatekeepers, too. And part of Monk’s story of self-realization stems from how he may have more in common with those White people than he’d like to admit.

There’s a terrific scene in which Monk and author-of-the-moment Sinatra Golden pointedly discuss their points of view on the exploitation of Black trauma by White people, so White people can feel better about themselves. It’s easy to side with Monk, but Sinatra makes salient points that nudge us, and possibly him, away from 100 percent certainty that it’s the correct viewpoint. Maybe if Monk was more constructive with his criticism, and less misanthropic in general, he’d be a happier human being – and all these implications manifest quietly, mostly unspoken, from Wright’s rich, carefully considered performance.

The underlying idea here is that people want definitive answers to morally fraught questions, despite living in a world where there are none. Consider the impossible situation Monk has created for himself: He writes a novel that baits White guilt, and he’s shooting fish in a barrel. He can’t lose, even if he names the book something so crass and unmarketable as F—. He also can’t win, evident by the film’s final scenes, when it transforms into meta-commentary. No scenario is ideal, so maybe Monk should stop worrying about Everything Else and work on the one thing he needs to know better: himself.

Our Call: American Fiction is funny, and insightful, and important without being self-important. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.