For people who feel internally motivated to make, be it improvisational jazz or fiction that sings, there is the sometimes less gratifying external pressure to make it—to produce work considered prescient, marketable or authentic according to the waymakers in their chosen field. What could otherwise be a generative creative practice becomes a footrace with resources and relevance awaiting those who cross the finish line.

What happens, then, for artists who refuse that race? What velvet ropes are retracted for Black creatives, for example, who happen to be wallflowers or grouches uninterested in ambassadorship or the approval of the waymakers?

For Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), the Black novelist and professor at the center of American Fiction, “making it” isn’t an intrinsic motivator. But Monk’s writing life becomes inundated with questions about authenticity and the value of acclaim when he uses the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh to pen My Pafology, a novel bloated with tropes about Black criminality that becomes an overnight bestseller among Black and white readers alike.

Monk writes My Pafology with the expectation that it’ll be rejected outright—he does it to blow off some steam and rub the noses of the publishing industry ‘in their own shit.’ But as Stagg R. Leigh’s star rises, Monk reckons with his literary self-conception as his home life, outfitted with adult siblings Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), and a new beau, Coraline (Erika Alexander), increasingly demand his attention.

American Fiction adapts Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure and marks the debut feature film of writer and director Cord Jefferson, who is most known for his television writing (The Good Place, Watchmen, Station Eleven). Since its debut at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award, American Fiction has picked up nominations from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice and Independent Spirit Awards, with the Academy more than likely on the horizon.

Early watches of Spike Lee and Robert Townsend films shaped Jefferson’s conception of movie making—what it could do, and how it could feel. “I lived in Tucson, Arizona, so not a lot of Black culture, but my parents were constantly exposing me to Black culture,” Jefferson tells me. “I was the only seven-year-old in the theater for Do the Right Thing. I probably shouldn’t have been there, but I was. I was seeing Do the Right Thing and I Mississippi Burning being a big thing, and there were all these documentaries like Eyes on the Prize.”

American Fiction’s blend of family drama and satire has been a considerable point of intrigue for Letterboxd . Irathethird writes: “The trailers sell you on Jeffrey Wright conning white people with his Black trauma porn book, but it’s really a multi-generational story about a Black family. Shades of James L. Brooks and we never get to see Black people just exist and love and fight and grow like we do here.” It’s true—American Fiction has an interest in the domestic everyday that comedic capers might otherwise toss aside.   

For Wright, the focus on family ties beyond Monk’s sharp-penned jape was a drawing factor. At the core of the film’s satire is a somber question about Monk’s own fear of being embraced as himself, in his personhood and written work alike. Wright suggests that this “sad in the funny” is intrinsic to effective satirical work. “Satire is tragedy in disguise,” the actor says. “We wanted to maintain that balance—you might see the trailer and think, ‘Oh, this is a comedy. It’s funny.’ But it’s not, to my mind, a comedy. There’s an underlying emotional element to it, particularly as it relates to Monk’s struggles with his own emotional availability and his relationship to love and family. There’s a wonderful pathos there.”

Jefferson echoes Wright, speaking to the casting and narrative factors that allow those dynamics to translate compellingly on screen. “It is a high-wire act to play a lovable grump, because if you err too far towards the grump, then people are like, ‘Well, fuck this guy. I am not rooting for him’,” the director explains. “I knew Jeffrey was going to play it prickly, because that’s the character. The key for me was to surround him with people who were effervescent, naturally charming and buoyant.”

“On the last page [of Erasure], there’s this Latin quote that apparently is used in relation to complex mathematics. The rough translation is ‘I offer no hypothesis’,” Jefferson says. “In keeping with the spirit of the novel, I didn’t want to make a movie that offered hypotheses, that said, ‘Here’s the moral of the story, here’s the lesson you’re supposed to learn.’ This is a movie that doesn’t offer easy answers. It is up for interpretation and allows people to understand things or not understand things.”

The absence of answers and laugh cues is an exercise in the freedom the film’s protagonist strains for. The freedom to make something without pathologizing or retrofitting it. Monk’s desire to exercise his artistic agency, to make a culture that understands Blackness as pluralistic and abundant in its expressions, is a yearning for liberation in the culture itself. Both Jefferson and Wright share anecdotes about the reach of American Fiction. Jefferson discusses an interaction between the costume designer, Rudy Mance, and an elderly white woman in Savannah, Georgia.

“She told him, ‘I found myself laughing harder than I laughed at a movie in so long. At a certain point, I realized that I was laughing at myself. It felt really good to be laughing at myself,’” Jefferson recalls. “That was an incredible compliment. I never wanted anything to feel mean-spirited. I never wanted the film to feel like it was punching down.” For the American Fiction writer and director, the movie isn’t an outright gut-punch or callout, rather a larking drama that makes way for the audience to weigh good intentions against impact.

He adds: “Something I try to keep in mind when I’m writing any character is that I am never interested in villains who are binary, good guy or bad guy. That’s boring. What’s more interesting is coming from Hanlon’s razor: the vast majority of people in the world wake up every day not intending to do harm.”

Wright reflects on the mass appeal of Monk’s pathology and the hope that American Fiction motivates audiences to have more developed conversations about representation, race and popular culture. “I have spoken with audience who weren’t Black, who found themselves inside Monk’s story, on both the creative side and the family side,” he says. “The film is an invitation to a conversation, to the asking of smarter questions. These are not questions necessarily for any one demographic group, rather for all of us.”

The actor continues: “We have such a dumbed-down series of conversations often around race and identity and culture. We’re afraid of it, some of us, to have those conversations in America. Although we are all informed by these forces every day, whether we want to it it or not—and we have been from the beginning—we either want to avoid the conversation or we’re traumatized by it. We, too often, certainly as a collective, lack fluency in race. Therefore, we rarely speak of race in intelligent ways. I hope our film at least allows people to gather around the campfire and have a reasonably evolved conversation.”

The American Fiction press tour united Jefferson with the Black filmmaker whose work shaped his own: the director of Hollywood Shuffle, Robert Townsend. Recently, Townshend co-hosted a Q&A with Jefferson after a screening of American Fiction at the American Film Institute. Therein lies a touching show of beyond the mad-dash footrace—a symbiosis of critical comedic cinema decades in the making.

“That was like waterworks,” Jefferson says. “I had never met him before, and I went back into the green room to thank him for coming. He stood up, gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek and said, ‘I love you, and I’m so proud of you.’ It was a full circle moment, and I don’t think that I would be here right now had I not seen that movie when I was a kid.”