The estimable Jeffrey Wright plays a literature professor whose highbrow novels aren't selling, sent on leave by his college for challenging his students' notions of political correctness. He duly goes to visit his family back in Boston.
It should be stated at this point that, as per the USA's one-drop rule, he's considered to be black, and his frustrations are largely due to the white-dominated publishing world only wanting black literature to conform to stereotypes of foul-mouthed rappers, gangstas with guns and drugs in the hood or proud, downtrodden individuals nobly suffering oppression, so that it sells to the majority white readership. Or, as he refers to it, 'black trauma porn'. So he sets out to write the very worst example of that genre for the purposes of ridiculing and undermining it, and is then dismayed when it's just taken at face value and becomes hugely popular instead.
What may strike non-American viewers as particularly surprising is finding an American film that combines a such subtle sense of ironic satire with a serious message. It doesn't consistently get the balance right, having to also somewhat needlessly incorporate the issues of other characters, mainly his mother with dementia, his intelligent-seeming new girlfriend and his reckless gay brother, but the point still gets through in the end, assuming that end isn't yet another fictional layer.
7/10
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