American Fiction follows a novelist whose literary books have fallen out of style. He writes books, and he's Black, but he doesn't write "Black" books, which are all the rage among publishers and readers, especially white readers. He believes there's more to the Black experience than slavery and oppression, but a woke, white world around him feels otherwise, and it wants to be validated by reading books and seeing movies focused on nothing but those subjects. His frustration builds and eventually bubbles over, manifesting itself in a pandering, stereotypical, inner-city novel filled with violence and ending with death by cop, written under a pseudonym of a writer alleged to be a felon on the run. It becomes a runaway success.
It's a smart movie, effective at straddling the line between dark comedic satire and touching family drama. Given the subject material, it'd be easy to botch the execution and make something entirely unfunny and uncomfortable to watch. American Fiction generally doesn't fall into those pitfalls, but it's not a subtle movie either. The satire at times is so on the nose - particularly one teleconference with the publishing house - that the film can border on absurdism.
Overall, it's a very enjoyable movie. There were segments where the writing project felt like a side plot to the more foregrounded family issues, but that's a feature, not a bug; it structurally drives home one of the main points of the movie: there's a Black family with any number of difficult family issues, but they're the kinds of problems faced by everyday people, regardless of race.
It's a smart movie, effective at straddling the line between dark comedic satire and touching family drama. Given the subject material, it'd be easy to botch the execution and make something entirely unfunny and uncomfortable to watch. American Fiction generally doesn't fall into those pitfalls, but it's not a subtle movie either. The satire at times is so on the nose - particularly one teleconference with the publishing house - that the film can border on absurdism.
Overall, it's a very enjoyable movie. There were segments where the writing project felt like a side plot to the more foregrounded family issues, but that's a feature, not a bug; it structurally drives home one of the main points of the movie: there's a Black family with any number of difficult family issues, but they're the kinds of problems faced by everyday people, regardless of race.