Director: Cord Jefferson

Stars: Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, Issa Rae, Erika Alexander, Tracee Ellis Ross, Adam Brody, Leslie Uggams

This multi-layered comedy drama, the debut feature of Cord Jefferson, adapted from the book ‘Erasure’ by Percival Everett, plays like a literary and more artful take on 'Bamboozled'. Jeffrey Wright is Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison a writer and disaffected lecturer in Los Angeles. After a classroom squabble with a white student who objects to a racial slur in a book, Monk is put on compulsory temporary leave. Around that time, he also attends a literary seminar with speaker Sinatra Golden (Rae), a prim writer whose book ‘We’s Lives in Da Ghetto’, Monk believes, panders to stereotypical notions of Blackness. Taking advantage of his time off, he visits his sick mother Agnes (Uggams) in Boston who has Alzheimer’s. His sister Lisa (Ross) still lives there and during Monk’s stay, his estranged gay brother, Cliff (Brown), a plastic surgeon, turns up. Stricken by worries about how to pay for his mother’s treatment, Monk submits his faux-authentically street book ‘My Pafology’, supposedly an autobiography of a ghetto player ‘Stagger R. Leigh’. Cue uncomfortable laughs as his book, to his horror, becomes a huge success, and he is courted by Hollywood. The estimable Wright gives what is possibly a career-best performance as the author questioning what price dignity. The satire is often broad and the script on-the-nose (Monk’s name is an early indicator) but it is very funny indeed, and thanks to a nuanced script and excellent supporting cast the sibling scenes feel genuinely organic and insightful.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm