American Fiction (2023)

This review took place during the St. Louis International Film Festival November 17-19.

What does it take to make a great story? Most would say it takes a creative mind and a serendipitous set of circumstances, and they’d be right. The strength of a movie like American Fiction, directed and written by Cord Jefferson, is that he made a screenplay based on livable facts. The movie itself is based on a book by Percival Everett called Erasure. The film’s plot revolves around a professor of English literature, Thelonious “Monk” Edison (Jeffrey Wright), who is tired of the authors celebrating the negative stereotypical aspects of the African-American experience. Monk discovers a new female writer, Sinatra Golden (Issa Ray), receiving high praise for her book on real black women; the only catch is that it follows every stereotype white publishers believe in. Monk, incensed by the fact that his intellectual work is not selling, says that if you can’t beat the game, then why not join it? He creates a separate identity of a reformed prison inmate Stagg R. Lee who writes about the dangers of his upbringing and the upbringing of those like him; the only catch is Monk is its writer.

The genius of a movie like this is that it peers into what it’s like to constantly be compared to stereotypes that don’t remotely signify who you are as a person but that people of wealthier incomes define you as. How do you battle that? How do you challenge that low bar? How do you find people as tired of the comparisons as you are? All these questions are constantly asked of not only the audience but the main characters as well. American Fiction has the best cast of 2023. You have people like Tracy Ellis Ross, who is in the film for no more than 10 minutes but makes a phenomenal impact to flesh out what Monk’s family life is like. Sterling K Brown shows up as Monk’s brother, Chris, a dysfunctional gay man trying to make his way in the world without any clue how to do so and feeling like he is never enough because he is gay. All of this extra story plays out while Monk struggles with his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and a new romantic partner, Cassandra (Erika Alexander).

Ultimately, I think this movie is about generational intelligence within one family and how it is used to both further one’s life and damage it simultaneously. As a character, Monk is a gifted writer, but he can’t see past his own neurosis. He has to be the smart one. He has to be the one with the hand. This attitude grates on people in the worst possible way, but it also makes the one character trying to make the most valid point the weakest voice in the room. The fact that erasure is a strong enough piece of literature that it can withstand those criticisms and use those negativities to breed such a rich and developed story with characters who were endlessly fascinated by how many African-American stories there are to tell. American Fiction is just one of them. The main weakness of the film is that sometimes the negative portrayals of African Americans and the humor found in it within this movie can be painful for an African American audience to be badgered with over the two-hour runtime constantly. As a person of that ethnicity, I’m glad all these horrible caricatures are called out for what they are rather than being swept up under the rug yet again because that’s what people feel is the reality. American fiction says I would rather challenge and change the narrative than bend to it, and if I have to bend to it, I will do so in my way. Creative storytelling excels when the silent becomes heard, and I feel like so many different groups of people will feel validated by the story told in this film. I would ask you to go out and see it, but with any luck, you’ll read this review and make creative individual stories I’ll watch on the theater screen one day.