Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction (TIFF)

In a purely unscientific poll taken of fellow moviegoers at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, American Fiction had the strongest word-of-mouth, so it wasn’t a shock when it won the People’s Choice Award. (Keep in mind that who bothers to vote and what films have had more screenings and the size of the venues all play into the calculation. Nevertheless, the viewers called it.) Though the title may remind audiences of a college 101 course, it is not homework. American Fiction is smart, funny, low-budget, lean, and old-school, with a script that is classic in its structure. (Writer and script consultant Robert McKee, I’m sure, would approve.)

Director Cord Jefferson, journalist-scriptwriter-now-first-time filmmaker, accomplishes quite a balancing act. He has made a family drama and, more pungently and winningly, a satire aimed at an adult audience. He pulls off both genres with flare, led by a sterling ensemble of Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams, as well as razor-sharp turns by invaluable character actors Jenn Harris and Michael Cyril Creighton, among others. Jefferson has adapted Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, and fluidly planted the storyline in the identity-driven politics of the 2020s. The scenario is as relevant as ever.  

Black literature professor Thelonious Ellison (a nod to Ralph Ellison), also known as Monk (like the jazz musician), hasn’t published in a year, and there have been numerous White student complaints about his no-holds-barred reactions to their objections to reading material they deem offensive. His department dean suggests he take a sabbatical and return to his home turf of Boston, since he will be there for a book festival, anyway. Except that is where his bougie family lives, and it’s not a haven. 

After the dismal sales of his literary novels, his longtime agent, Arthur (John Ortiz), speaks bluntly: The industry wants a “Black” book from Monk. After all, We Lives in Da Ghetto, by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), a Black Ivy Leaguer and former reader at a publishing house, has ruled the best-seller list. So as a goof, Monk sets out to write a book he believes will fulfill all that publishers want: deadbeat dads, police killings, drug addiction. Presumably inspired by “Stagger Lee,” a folk song about a murder, he uses the alias Stagg R. Leigh for his manuscript, My Pafology, that is submitted to many publishing houses. Monk assumes the joke is on them, until editor Paula Baderman (the priceless Miriam Shor) lavishes praise upon his text. In the slickest lingo outside of a Hollywood talent agency, she offers him a 750K advance and promises his book will be “the read of the summer,” published in time for Juneteenth. Soon after, a Hollywood producer comes sniffing around with another lucrative hard-to-refuse offer. 

The entire film is a combination of sweet and sour—even a tragic moment precedes laughter. The tone vacillates throughout while interweaving two interconnected storylines. As the late director Sydney Pollack would say, a good script has to have a spine. In the case of Jefferson’s screenplay, it’s the slow decent of Monk from his pedantic pedestal. It’s a delightful comeuppance. 

Satire is hard to pull off, or at least it has been recently in U.S. films—all actors need to be on the same page and take the circumstances seriously, even if they may be in on the joke. In this case, the cast plays it straight, so to speak, and know when to let a zinger rip. All the humor is embedded with the situations at hand. The satiric target is the largely White publishing industry’s back-bending efforts at representation, Hollywood studio films (granted, an easy mark), and a large part of this movie’s likely audience—the knee-jerky liberal White NPR listeners/New York Times readers. The comedy-drama is an equal opportunity offender. It doesn’t make anyone more of an object of derision than another.  

Given there are no winners or losers here, the film lacks a hard punch. The script could have easily been harsher about the publishing industry’s fearful mindset. And if anyone is let off lightly, it is opportunist Sintara Golden, for deliberately writing a formulaic moneymaker. She admits to Monk she caters to publishers’ taste, writing what readers want to buy. Yet from the excerpt of her acclaimed novel—chock-full of stereotypes—that she reads before a fawning, overwhelmingly White audience, her work is a cut-and-paste job of clichés.  

Apart from the script’s verbose verbal volleys, what is left unsaid is equally arresting: the dynamics of Monk’s family of high achievers, with a critical, domineering father at the helm. (Monk’s brother and sister followed in their father’s footsteps and became doctors.) The cost of living up to the parents’ high standards plays out before you, but the motivations on why such tenacity for the patriarch’s approval doesn’t need to be spoken. In a year where the box-office champ hit viewers over their heads with its preaching—yes, Barbie, that’s you—American Fiction comes off as a sleight of hand achievement.