American Fiction Review: Authentic for Whom?

American Fiction is a comedy about a bad book. It is also the most honest film I have seen about the market for Black stories.

That market is real. I have watched it work in food for most of my career. There is a version of "authentic" that buyers, investors and shelf planners already have in their heads, and if your product doesn't look like that picture, it is very hard to get it onto the shelf. Cord Jefferson's film is about publishing, but I recognized every room in it.

The details: American Fiction (2023). Written and directed by Cord Jefferson in his feature debut, adapted from Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure. Starring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody and Keith David. Streaming on MGM+ and available to rent or buy on major platforms.

The setup is a dare

Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a novelist and professor whose books earn academic respect and sell poorly. His latest manuscript gets rejected for not being "Black" enough. Then he watches a packed room swoon over a bestseller called We's Lives in Da Ghetto.

So Monk writes the book he thinks they want, out of contempt. He calls it My Pafology. He fills it with every stereotype he can find. He uses a pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh. And it sells. He is offered a $750,000 advance, then a movie deal, and eventually he is asked to help judge a literary prize where his own fake book is a contender.

It is a very funny premise. Jefferson is smart enough not to let it stay just funny.

Satire is a data problem

Here is what the creative scientist in me kept noticing. Nobody in this film is exactly lying. The publishers really do believe they are listening to readers. The prize judges really do believe they are rewarding truth. The system has simply trained itself on a narrow dataset of what Black life is supposed to look like, and it keeps rewarding whatever matches the pattern.

That is how recommendation engines work too. They learn what got clicked last time and serve it back to you, louder. The film is set in publishing, but it reads to me like a parable about every algorithm that mistakes a stereotype for a preference.

The most interesting character in that system is Sintara Golden, the author of the ghetto bestseller, played by Issa Rae. The film refuses to make her a villain. She has studied the market. She has made choices. When she and Monk finally talk, the conversation is less about who is right and more about who gets to be complicated, and who gets paid for being simple.

The real movie is at the dinner table

What I didn't expect is how much of American Fiction is a family drama, and how good it is at that.

Monk's mother, played beautifully by Leslie Uggams, is showing signs of Alzheimer's. His sister Lisa, a physician, dies suddenly. His brother Cliff, played by Sterling K. Brown with real looseness and pain, comes home newly divorced and newly out. The money from the fake book is what pays for their mother's care.

That detail is the whole thesis for me. Monk sells out because care is expensive. The film never pretends that integrity is free. It shows you the bill.

These family scenes are full of the specific, unglamorous textures of Black middle class life: a beach house, a housekeeper who is part of the family, a wedding, old arguments that never quite end. This is exactly the material the publishers in the film would call "not Black enough." Jefferson puts it at the center of his movie and lets it be the most alive thing on screen.

Where it stumbles

The final act plays games with endings, and not every game lands. A few satirical targets, especially the Hollywood producer, are drawn broader than the rest of the film. I wanted a little more of Erika Alexander's Coraline, who deserves more than being the person Monk disappoints.

But these are small complaints about a film that knows exactly what it is doing.

What it means for anyone who makes things

As someone writing a book and making an animated film about Black food history, I take American Fiction personally, in the best way. It asks a question every creator from a marginalized community has to answer: will you make the thing the market already recognizes, or the thing that is true?

The film's answer is that the market is not a neutral mirror. It is a set of habits. Habits can be changed, but only if enough of us keep showing up with work that doesn't fit the pattern. The same is true of the grocery aisle, the venture pitch and the streaming queue.

Taste is not fixed. Someone is always training it.

Verdict

Watch it. American Fiction earned its Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and its Toronto People's Choice Award honestly. It is a satire with a heart, a family film with teeth, and a mirror held up to every industry that says it wants new voices and then asks them to sound familiar. Bring it to your book club. Then bring it to your next product meeting.

Cover image: Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios via About Amazon