First Look: American Fiction Challenges Hollywood’s “Poverty of Imagination” About Black People

What makes a piece of art “Black”? That’s a central question at the heart of Emmy winner Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut, American Fiction, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival next month before opening in theaters on November 17. Based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, American Fiction stars Jeffrey Wright as Dr. Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a writer and college professor who has never found critical or commercial success as a highbrow novelist. Monk finally stumbles upon success when he—in his opinion—lowers the bar, pandering to the white gaze of the Black experience with a novel written under a pseudonym as a formerly incarcerated inmate. Out pours My Pafology, a book detailing his life in the hood, rife with gun violence, drug deals gone wrong, police brutality, and gang warfare. You know, Black stuff.

To Monk, My Pafology represents the worst of culture—an inauthentic and morally corrupt satire that trades in the most basic and reductive stereotypes about Black people. To the world, it’s a moving, gritty, and raw portrait of the Black experience, and it becomes an instant hit. Who’s right, Monk or the world? And if the book’s a success, does it even matter?

“We were auditioning this actor, this woman who’d been working and acting for about 50 years. She’s been at it for almost half a century. And she said to me before the start of the audition, ‘I can’t believe they’re letting you make this movie,’” Jefferson tells Vanity Fair. “She was like, ‘I can’t believe that they’re letting you say all this stuff. These are things that I’ve been wanting to say for 50 years in my career. The fact that you’re allowed to make this is amazing.’”

“One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote those words in The Souls of Black Folk, describing the internal struggle—the double consciousness—Black Americans face merely existing in society, the constant duality of perceiving ourselves not only through our own eyes but through the eyes of an often racist, predominantly white society. More than a century later, American Fiction’s Monk faces the same struggle. At the beginning of the film, he chastises a hapless employee over his latest novel’s placement in the “African American literature” section of a bookstore, as he’s longing to be seen not as a Black writer, but simply as a writer.

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That’s something that Jefferson can deeply relate to. The son of a white mother and Black father, Jefferson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications including The Ringer, GQ, and The New Yorker, as well serving as an editor at Gawker until 2016.

“Right as I was exiting the profession, I wrote this piece called ‘The Racism Beat’ about how I had reached a point in my career as a journalist when people were just coming to me to talk about the latest Black tragedy,” Jefferson says. “It was like, ‘Trayvon Martin’s shot and killed. Please write an essay about this.’ This Black person was shot and killed. Please write an essay about this. It got to the point where it’s like, ‘Is this all I have to offer?’”

Moving to a career in Hollywood felt like a fresh start. “I thought, Oh, great, I’m in the world of fiction. People are going to come to me and ask me to write about aliens and unicorns on Mars—just all these stories that I haven’t been able to write before.” He was wrong. “And then I got here and people were like, ‘Oh, do you want to write this story about slaves? You want to write this story about crack addicts? Do you want to write this story about drug dealers and gang members?’” Jefferson persisted, writing for acclaimed series like Master of None, Succession, and Watchmen, for which he won a writing Emmy.

Later that year he picked up Everett’s novel Erasure, “and about 50 pages in I knew that I wanted to adapt it and write the script,” Jefferson says. The urge to direct had crossed his mind, but Jefferson was waiting until, as he puts it, “I really felt the material in my bones and felt like I [could] do this as well as anybody else on the planet.” Erasure turned out to be the right fit.

Even with an Emmy under his belt, Jefferson was “incredibly intimidated” showing up to set as a first-time director leading the likes of Jeffrey Wright. “I’ve never directed anything in my life, not a commercial, not a short film. I had never written a movie before,” says Jefferson. “All of a sudden I’m giving Jeffrey Wright acting notes?” he says, in disbelief. “It’s like telling Michael Jordan how to do a jump shot.”

But Wright was his only choice from the very beginning. “When I was still reading Erasure, I started reading Monk’s lines in Jeffrey’s voice. I started thinking of Jeffrey when I started imagining the scenes,” he says.

The role of Monk requires astounding nuance and range from Wright, who has to code-switch from exasperated college professor to ex-con at the drop of a dime. Wright, a Tony and Emmy winner, was up for it. “Jeffrey was incredibly collaborative from square one,” says Jefferson. “He never made me feel bad or condescended me or treated me poorly because I didn’t know as much as him about being on film sets. He was just incredibly helpful the entire way.”

Not every collaborator is as generous as Wright, Jefferson notes. “I think that some people talk the talk when it comes to actually trying to help people who are underrepresented, we’ll say, in film and television,” he says. “And I think that some people talk the talk and don’t actually do that. And then I think some people talk the talk and actually do that.”

“When a guy like Jeffrey Wright, who is in high demand and is in properties like 007 and Batman—when he is willing to sit down with somebody like me and say, ‘You know what? I’m going to put faith and trust in you, and we’re going to do this together,’ that meant the world to me from the get-go,” says Jefferson. “I will be forever indebted to him because of that.”

American Fiction isn’t only about what it takes to make excellent Black art. It’s also about what it means to come from a Black-excellence-obsessed family. After being put on a leave of absence from his college professor gig due to a race-related incident, Monk returns home to Boston. He reconnects with his doctor siblings, played by Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown; he cares for his ailing mother, played by legendary Tony winner Leslie Uggams; and he falls for his public-defender neighbor, played by Living Single’s Erika Alexander. As the only non-medical doctor among his siblings—no, his English PhD doesn’t count—Monk struggles to find common ground with them.

“There is a real poverty of imagination when it comes to people’s perceptions of what Black life looks like,” says Jefferson. “It’s this idea that ‘I don’t understand how this represents Black people if there’s not some misery associated with it.’ I reject that.”

Brown in particular pops as Cliff, Monk’s surgeon brother. It’s a surprisingly funny turn that’s a far cry from the steadfast husband Randall on This Is Us, which won Brown an Emmy. Uggams, too, is both hilarious and heartbreaking as Monk’s mother, Agnes, who’s struggling with dementia. It’s a part of the story that’s particularly personal for the director. Jefferson lost his mother to cancer, and his half-brothers lost their biological mother to dementia just last year. “I had sort of seen that up close and talked to my siblings about it,” he says. “So it was a world that I knew well and wanted to make sure that I captured accurately so that it felt authentic.”

While the film deals with some weighty subjects regarding race and loss, Jefferson’s directorial debut has a breezy quality and humor about it. Some of this is due to Cristina Dunlap’s cinematography, which captures the beachy beauty of Martha’s Vineyard, where much of the film takes place. But it’s part of Jefferson’s commitment to his community too. “What I think is beautiful about Black people, and the thing that I think we have in common with Jewish people and the queer community and Asian people and any oppressed group, is that even in the worst of times, in the harshest of tragedies and the harshest of circumstances, we still found a way to laugh and to make music and to fall in love and to enjoy each other’s company and enjoy life,” he says.

While Monk may be firm in his convictions about Black art, the film is ultimately more ambiguous on the matter. “I think that one of the things that I want people to understand about the film is that the film is not out to scold anybody or finger wag or lecture,” says Jefferson.

Questions regarding the intersection between race, identity, and storytelling abound with Issa Rae’s character, Sintara, an Oberlin-educated rival author whose novel We’s Lives in da Ghetto is a bestseller, much to Monk’s horror. Whether Sintara is exploiting white people’s perception of Blackness for her own personal gain, or leveraging her identity to give people what they want in order to get what she deserves, is a question left for the audience’s interpretation.

“There are no easy answers to these kinds of things,” says Jefferson. “I like that ambiguity.” He wants audiences to simply join him on the ride “It was a conversation that I was having with my friends for literally decades with other Black creatives and artists and journalists,” says Jefferson. “It was a conversation that we were all having all the time.”

Jefferson is still thinking about the woman who auditioned for American Fiction. “This movie is in many ways, in my mind, a love letter to Black Hollywood and to Black artists in general,” he says, “people like that woman and many other people—the kind of frustrations that they endured in order to allow me, a century later, to come in and make this movie. I think that it is a love letter to those people.”