The Washington Area Film Critics Association recently gave American Fiction its “Best Feature” award for 2023. Given how Oppenheimer dominated the other wins, it’s likely that it and this year’s other frontrunner, Killers of the Flower Moon, split the vote among WAFCA members; I voted for one of those two films, allowing writer and director Cord Jefferson’s feature debut to slip through to victory. The award is a surprise, although not an unwanted one, since Jefferson’s film is a wry, well-acted exploration of family and race through a likable, flawed protagonist. Sometimes, however, American Fiction loses focus—it can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a satire or a family drama, yet Jeffrey Wright’s terrific lead performance is a strong anchor.

Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a middle-aged professor and writer whose latest book isn’t selling. He writes literary fiction, the kind of novelist who earns respect but doesn’t top bestseller lists. Resentment is a slight consolation for Monk—he is used to being the smartest person in any room—though that is little solace when a rival novelist, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), becomes a literary sensation with a book that Monk believes trivializes the Black experience. A family crisis further erodes his patience: His mother’s memory keeps getting worse, while a death in the family means he must return home to Boston for longer than anticipated. In a haze of anger and spite, Monk decides to write an intentionally awful book that’s “more Black”—Jefferson’s words—than his typical work. He calls it My Pafology and invents the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh” for the byline. But to Monk’s chagrin and the delight of his long-suffering editor (John Ortiz), the book becomes a hit and there is a bidding war over the movie rights to it.

Monk is an ironic position: He is angry, perhaps even jealous, of himself. He also loathes the publishing world, rich with White liberal guilt. The best jokes in American Fiction involve Jefferson depicting literary agents and other writers whose platitudes do not disguise how ridiculous they sound. Wright’s performance is key to understanding how we feel about them: At first the success of My Pafology shocks him, then gets him so angry that he leans even harder in to his alter ego. Jefferson relies on a familiar comic trope: Each time Monk thinks he pushes the deception too far, the people he mocks only want more. This arc is similar to Spike Lee’s 2000 satire Bamboozled, which follows a TV executive who is told to be “more Black” until he creates a modern minstrel show out of spite, except American Fiction is nowhere as savage. Through Monk, Jefferson and Wright have a character who wants more than just to burn down the hypocritical institutions that frustrate him.   

Aside from Monk’s ailing mother, there are several subplots that give us a better understanding of him and his family. Monk’s brother, Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), is a divorced plastic surgeon, who is finally leaning in to his identity as a gay man. Their sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), is a doctor who resents her brothers because she picked up the responsibility of taking care of their mother. These dialogue-heavy scenes have gentler humor than the story of Monk’s new book, to the point that American Fiction undergoes an identity crisis. On one hand, it is an off-kilter satire, on the other it’s a middling family drama that has the usual arcs of pain and forgiveness. Monk’s new girlfriend, Coraline (Erika Alexander), adds some normalcy, even the possibility of a future, and yet Jefferson’s clash between the two concurrent stories doesn’t have the energy or edge both require. It is almost as though Jefferson thought so deeply about how to depict the escalation of My Pafology that everything else is an afterthought.

Agreeable and uneven, American Fiction is the sort of film that makes you wonder whether it could have been more. The final scenes, a kind of cop-out where Jefferson depicts multiple outcomes and declines to say which ending he prefers, only underscores that point. Perhaps that is the same ending as his source material, the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, but faithfulness is not always the preferred way of handling a great idea. Jefferson shoots his material like a sitcom, a kind of flat palette that gives his actors room for punchlines and reaction, but demonstrates an aversion to the instincts that might make his film tighter, or his targets more uncomfortable.

The film culminates with an irony that seems to elude Jefferson: He has made a film that targets specific White liberal sensibilities, but the cuts are so superficial, so clean, that the very people he targets might end up his primary audience. Maybe Monk, or Stagg R. Leigh at the very least, would advise him to push a little bit harder: We can take a film that actually veers into offensive territory, rather than being merely about it.

American Fiction opens in area theaters on Dec. 22.