Anyone sufficiently marinated in the 24/7 stew of tabloid news will know that Black Americans, when they're not being overcompensated for their skills at sports and entertainment, are usually to be found excelling at crime and mayhem. Everybody knows this.

Black Americans themselves, however — the ones going about their lives just like everybody else, every damn day — are said to sometimes find this media narrative ... what's the word ... insulting. Take Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, the college professor and author played by Jeffrey Wright in "American Fiction," a splendid first feature by writer-director Cord Jefferson. Monk wouldn't know crime or mayhem if they ganged up and beat him to the ground. The man is deeply upper-middle-class, a writer of books so highfalutin nobody wants to read them. (In bookstores, they're instantly grouped under "African American Studies" and left to molder.)

Monk would like his writing to be read, obviously. But the only way to make that happen ... well, his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz), keeps urging him to embrace his Black identity as his subject. And Monk himself has noticed that a top-seller in stores right now is "We's Lives In Da Ghetto," the new book by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) — an author who's never let a fancy Oberlin college degree get in the way of her girl-in-the-hood literary pose. Why can't Monk come up with a book like hers?

Because he finds professional Blackness to be entirely retrograde, is why. "Books like this flatten our lives," he says. On top of that, the audience for them seems to be composed largely of condescending white academics — the sort of people who can't discuss Black culture without tossing in terms like "carceral state."

However, circumstances conspire to force Monk into writing exactly the sort of book he so dislikes. It begins back in his hometown of Boston, where his aged mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams), is slipping into dementia. Soon astronomical medical bills impend, and Monk's brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) and sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) regret they can't supply any financial help. So Monk fires up his laptop and bangs out a book he calls "My Pathology." No, wait — to make it more "real," more street, he spells it "My Pafology." He also adopts a pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh (a nod to a celebrated pimp in 19th-century Black folklore) and whips up a gaudy author-bio: Mr. Leigh is not only a convicted criminal, readers are told, but he is also, at the moment, a fugitive from the law. The marketing begins.

Monk's agent is elated that his client has finally seen the light, and he starts trolling for book deals. An offer of $750,000 comes winging in almost immediately. Monk is amazed and disheartened in equal measure; he wrote the book as a sour joke, but no one is getting it. Naturally, it's not long before Hollywood comes calling.

The movie is based on a 2001 novel called "Erasure" by Percival Everett, a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Director Jefferson, a TV writer who worked on HBO's exceptional "Watchmen" adaptation, logs the story's woke-world elements without too much heavy eye-rolling. We note that the only reason Monk is invited to be a judge in a book competition is because his presence will help obscure an utter absence of diversity. We sigh very deeply as a white media guy dazzles a Black writer with phrases like "Nice to meet you, brother" and "You feel me?" And we naturally wonder why it should be felt necessary to refer to a book as "the strongest African American novel I've read in a long time" instead of just, like, the strongest novel, period.

Given all the opportunities for sociopolitical eye-poking, the movie is surprisingly heartwarming. And it's hard to imagine a much better cast — especially Erika Alexander as Coraline, the lovable local woman Monk has the good sense to fall for, and Myra Lucretia Taylor as Lorraine, the Ellison family's longtime housekeeper, who discovers at the end of her life that she still has a lot of love left to give. It must also be mentioned that Jeffrey Wright, who's been improving every movie he's been in for more than 30 years now, really lights this one up.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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