The 10-strong Oscar Best Picture shortlist for 2024 is the most impressive it’s been in years – a selection which combines full-throttle American blockbusters (Barbenheimer) with European arthouse hits (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest), a touching comedy (The Holdovers), a searing crime saga (Killers of the Flower Moon), a sweeping biopic (Maestro), an intimate romance (Past Lives) and a madcap fantasy (Poor Things). You’re sure to have seen at least some of them already, and others may be on your watch list, but there’s one contender among them that could easily have passed you by: American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s searing and hysterically funny feature debut, which only recently hit cinemas in the UK. All I’ll say is, don’t sleep on it – it’s a scorcher.
Adapted from Percival Everett’s audacious 2001 novel Erasure, it’s a touching family drama which moonlights as an incisive satire; a surprisingly powerful hand grenade of a film which somehow manages to be both thrillingly provocative and wonderfully accessible. Much of this is down to Jeffrey Wright, who gives a subtle but brilliant central performance as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a professor who’s at the end of his tether – he’s frustrated by his students, most of whom are white and, in his view, too easily offended by the racially charged texts he teaches in class, and his latest novel is rejected because, in the words of his agent (a frequently hilarious John Ortiz), it’s not “Black” enough.
On temporary leave from his university, Monk travels to Boston for a book festival, but finds that while his own reading is poorly attended, crowds are flocking to see another writer: Sintara Golden (a delightful Issa Rae), whose pandering, stereotype-filled new novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto is a runaway hit. Is this really what the world wants from him then, he wonders – yet another tale of poverty and violence?
It’s at this point that the film, in some senses, splits into two: one half of it is about Monk’s eccentric, dysfunctional family – his witty sister (a magnetic Tracee Ellis Ross, criminally underused here), raucous brother (a barnstorming Sterling K Brown), and ailing mother (Leslie Uggams) – whom he then visits in Boston. The second we arrive at their grand old house and meet their lovable housekeeper (Myra Lucretia Taylor), it’s clear that Monk had a privileged upbringing. He’s someone who says he doesn’t “even really believe in race”, insulated as he is from some of the harsher realities of being Black in America. There’s some intellectual snobbery in his disdain for Sintara Golden’s work, though he’s not wrong to criticise its reduction of the African American experience. Still, Monk doesn’t linger on this – that is, until his mother’s condition worsens and he finds himself in need of more money to pay for her care but still unable to sell his book.
Which brings us to the other half of the film: in a fit of frustration, Monk writes My Pafology, a crude tale of gun-toting hustlers, drug dealing and absent fathers, under the pseudonym Stagg R Leigh and then sends it to his agent. His hope is to hold up a mirror to the hypocrisy of the publishing industry which peddles narratives about Black pain to white audiences, and squeezes authors of colour into increasingly smaller boxes, dictating what they’re able to write. In the end, though, the joke backfires: the book sells, and becomes the most successful thing Monk has ever published.
Both halves of American Fiction are necessary (not to mention incredibly funny) – the family saga is the heart, and the satire the head – but it’s the latter, in particular, that had me in literal stitches. Monk’s lie quickly spins out of control, birthing a million-dollar movie deal, primetime interviews, and snagging the book a spot on the shortlist for a prestigious literary award, one which, ironically, Monk is on the judging panel for. From this point onwards, the film’s pleasures are too numerous to recount, from the incredible attention to detail throughout (one of the white publishers who gushes over My Pafology has a poster of Ruth Bader Ginsburg wearing boxing gloves in her office) to a delicious cameo from Adam Brody as a smarmy Hollywood producer, and the scene where Monk arrives at his agent’s office in a T-shirt because he, a man who ordinarily always wears a shirt, was asked to dress “street”.
It’s worth saying that American Fiction’s brand of comedy is broad, and in the first few minutes of the film I found myself wondering if it was maybe a little bit too broad. But then, the film shows you that it knows exactly what it’s doing: when Monk first shares My Pafology with his agent, the latter tells him that he sees what he’s getting at. “Good,” replies Monk. “It’s not subtle.” And that’s the point – there’s nothing subtle about the stories of Black trauma constantly plastered across our screens so, when it comes to skewering them, you shouldn’t have to be subtle either.
As the story continues, though, the film does become more subtle – as Monk’s very rigid view of the world slowly softens, American Fiction, too, becomes more nuanced. Its best scene comes towards the end, when Monk and Sintara Golden, who is also on the judging panel of the literary award, chat over lunch. She’s read his book – unaware that he is its writer, of course – and, unlike the other white judges, found it to be pandering. Monk is both delighted that someone finally agrees with him, and also vaguely offended. How is it, he asks her, so very different from hers?
She’s startled. She did a lot of research for her book, she tells him, and some of her tales of deprivation and single motherhood were taken from real interviews. Has he forgotten that some of the suffering we see in Black stories is actually real, too? But, he counters, didn’t she go to a fancy college and work at a flashy publishing house? Sintara replies that she isn’t writing about her own life – she’s writing about something people are interested in. Is it so wrong to cater to the market and to the white publishers who run it? Surely only the immensely privileged who are content to make art without making money can avoid doing that. Monk argues that she’s flattening Black lives and affecting how white people perceive them. To this, Sintara says, “It sounds like your issue is with white people, not me.”
It’s an utterly brilliant scene, and even better because of the way it ends – their conversation is suddenly interrupted by one of their white colleagues and they fall silent. Neither is wholly wrong or right, and the question of who is making the most salient point hangs in the air – it’s one that each audience member can answer for themselves.
Not everything in American Fiction is as masterful as that – a romantic subplot between Monk and a sweet-natured neighbour, as played by Erika Alexander, feels a little half baked (she has shades of Claire from The Bear about her, being a public defence lawyer who is seemingly never working and appears to have no life beyond her devotion to Monk). But, that plot line does, at least, conclude in a way that feels realistic and satisfying, as does the film itself – with one epic set piece, and a quieter moment which telegraphs Monk’s personal growth, limited though it is.
It makes for the perfect ending to what is undoubtedly one of the best films of the year, and one which I hope won’t leave the Oscars empty handed come March. Sadly, it is unlikely to win Best Picture, and both Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K Brown, nominated in the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor categories, respectively, aren’t expected to triumph, but there’s a chance that Cord Jefferson could scoop the Best Adapted Screenplay prize. Here’s hoping he does – and that his victory gets even more people to see this gem of a movie.
American Fiction is in cinemas now.