‘American Fiction’ review: Jeffrey Wright shines in a comedy of a fake Black memoir’s rise to the top of the bestseller list

Nearly 11 years ago, apparently writing for the Federal Bureau of Stating the Obvious, I did a phoner with Jeffrey Wright. He had a movie coming out that week, the title of which I had to look up just now because even the people who made it don’t remember it. By then, Wright had become a lot of people’s favorite actor. Mine, too.

“It’s getting so Wright can simply walk through a door in his first scene in a movie, and the audience collectively grins, knowing it’s in extremely good hands for however many minutes this particular actor will be running the show.” That’s what I wrote about Wright, co-star of the 2013 “Broken City” (look it up). In that interview, Wright spoke of his police commissioner character’s “mysterious quality, his stealthiness, (which) is important to him as an operator, an observer and, above all, a survivor … power doesn’t scream because it doesn’t have to. That’s what I was going for, anyway.”

Those qualities describe Wright pretty well. His deep, back-of-the-throat voice commands attention without theatrics. His stillness is never static; he’s always alert and thinking and incrementally telling the audience something about the person he’s playing.

All that’s present and welcome in his latest film, the sly and engaging social satire “American Fiction,” but the work he’s doing here is super subtle and low-key in the service of a largely reactive character, surrounded by bigger, louder personalities. Even when director Cord Jefferson’s debut feature dulls its edge in the final few scenes, Wright keeps the interplay sharp.

Wright’s character, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, is an Los Angeles-based university academic and semi-prestigious low-selling novelist, temperamentally at odds with the sort of “Black trauma porn” written, he feels, for the benefit of guilty (or clueless; the world’s always been big enough for both) white liberals. Monk has had it with his white students; early on, one says she’s offended by a racial slur in a Flannery O’Connor short story. Monk comes back with: “I got over it, Brittany. I’m sure you can, too.”

He pays for that, but he’s been riding for a fall for a while. When Monk’s literary agent (John Ortiz) urges his casually self-destructive friend and client to write something different, less “literary,” more “street,” he responds with a fake Black memoir — a thug’s life, written in tortured vernacular and violence on every other page — soaked in every stereotype and cliche on the bestselling Black author list. Title: “My Pafology.” Monk’s chosen author name: Stagg R. Leigh.

Boom! Game-changer! Four million dollar movie sale! Monk’s stunned, and spends the rest of director and adapter Jefferson’s narrative (taken from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure”) in a sweat of imminent exposure and scandal. “American Fiction” takes place in Boston and in the South Shore coastal town of Scituate. Monk’s family matters, and the stresses of keeping up his masquerade, fuel the comic tension.

Wright has a great cast around him, with ringers up and down. Sterling K. Brown as Monk’s estranged brother; Tracee Ellis Ross as his sister; Leslie Uggams as the family matriarch, whose health is not great; Erika Alexander as the public defender across the way from Monk’s family’s summer place; everyone’s a vital and supple part of a true ensemble affair.

I wish the last 20-25 minutes or so didn’t feel quite so tidy, and — unlike the best of “American Fiction” — quite so tame. There are times when Jefferson’s skill as a writer outmatches his fledging skills as a director. And part of me wonders what a wilder sensibility might’ve activated in the premise. As is, the movie we have is a movie that works, blending seriocomic domestic material with the larger, more pointed social observations about white liberal guilt, code-switching Black authors (Issa Rae is most welcome as Monk’s primary foil) and a lot more.

And that, folks, is how an unassumingly well-made film behind the camera can take it up a notch or three. Everybody who saw and enjoyed “The Holdovers” now has another sweet-and-sour success, anchored by another terrific actor, to see over the holidays. So, go.

“American Fiction” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language throughout, some drug use, sexual references and brief violence)

Running time: 1:57

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Dec. 21

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune