Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

Being a White guy who loves a movie about Black people pandering to White audiences with misguided love for stereotypical depictions of Black people can be . . . tricky. Is there a version of MetaCritic out there that just aggregates the reviews of Black critics? That would be so helpful! How do I know whether or not I am being complicit in the very thing this film is critiquing and satirizing?

Well, there is the fact that the Black Film Critics Circle named American Fiction its Best Film of 2023. Whew. What a relief! So I don’t have to worry about this anymore . . . right?

I will say this, to other White people watching this movie: there are no White people in major roles, but there are plenty of them in small parts throughout, and they are worth paying particularly close attention to. The vast majority of them serve as one example or another of White people convinced of their allyship while being unable to see their own latent racism. This usually comes through in some kind of subtle gag, always very well executed, the only possible downside being that it might go down too easily. These are behaviors that stem from genuine truths, and are worth reflection.

Side note: the one example of a white character I can think of who isn’t used as an example in this way is the one White gay character. And honestly, racism in the queer community is something that could really use its own kind of exposure—comic or otherwise—in cinema, but writer-director Cord Jefferson and co-writer Percival Everett, upon whose novel Erasure this film is based, already have enough going on in this movie.

Speaking of gay characters, Sterling K. Brown plays Jeffrey Wright’s gay brother in this film, an interesting tidbit when it comes to representation in casting. Increasingly films are criticized for casting straight actors in queer roles, but given the topic and premise of American Fiction, I can’t see many people having the balls to criticize it for this. And I’m not going to either, actually—both because I felt Sterling K. Brown was objectively well cast and did a good job. I also loved that no effort whatsoever was made to make Brown’s character, Cliff, any “gayer” than Brown is as a regular guy himself. There’s a scene in which Cliff has two gay guys around, one of them the aforementioned White guy—wearing nothing but a Speedo—and those guys lean a bit more into obvious queerness, but in a way that was comfortably subtle. It actually felt like a reasonable representation of the diversity of queer expression.

But this is largely the point of American Fiction, in which the protagonist, Monk (Wright), is a well-off author from a wealthy Black family of doctors, Monk being the self-described “black sheep” because he is a novelist. He is also a highbrow writer, a professor, and a terminally flawed character. He’s deeply frustrated, both by the low sales of his beautifully written, complex prose, and by fellow Black writers (one in particular is played by the always-welcome Issa Rae) who seem to exploit stereotypes in order to write best-sellers.

American Fiction is kind of two movies in one, only one of which got much acknowledgment in the film’s promotion: the unusually successful satire, about “Black art” and how White people respond to it. The other is a family drama, in which Monk deals with multiple deaths in the family, as well as the gradually worsening dementia of his widowed mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams). There are some who find it difficult to reconcile these two sides of the film, but Cord Jefferson strikes a delicate balance with this narrative that ultimately works. An important element here is how the characters of this film are multidimensional while the characters in the books and movies they talk about (or write) are one-dimensional.

The last act of American Fiction suddenly gets very meta, in a way the film had not at all been before then, and it almost lost me. I tend to love meta commentary when done well, but for a moment, the narrative of American Fiction itself becomes the narrative of something Monk is adapting into a movie, and I wasn’t sure if we’d ever get any real resolution to the “real life” characters. To Cord Jefferson’s ample credit, he brings the narrative back around, so the story we’d been seeing up to that point, and the story Monk is now spinning, meet up again, in a genuinely satisfying way.

American Fiction is a carefully crafted work of art, the kind in which nothing is an accident and there’s far more to consider than what’s on the surface. Monk, as a character, is someone we are eager to root for, even though he can be kind of an asshole. Just like any person. What this film pointedly refuses to do is either make him a trope or make him a flawless hero. He’s actually very self-involved, which his otherwise very understandable snobbery about literature only exacerbates. And American Fiction pulls off a bit of a magic trick, being a genuinely entertaining movie while also having a whole lot to say that’s worth considering beyond the confines of its narratives. There’s a whole lot more going on in it than I could cover here, but you should just watch it, as it’s all ripe for discovery.

*There’s a whole lot of compelling ideas in here.*

Overall: A-