American Fiction

American Fiction (2023) — watch online on iFILM: a razor-sharp satirical comedy written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a novelist and literature professor whose literary fiction keeps getting dismissed as not "Black enough."

Fed up, Monk writes a deliberately outrageous parody under a fake name — a manuscript stuffed with every racial cliché he can think of — and expects the industry to recoil. Instead, publishers fight over it and readers eat it up. Now Monk has to decide whether to come clean or keep playing a character he invented to mock the very audience chasing him. Sterling K. Brown and Erika Alexander round out a sharp ensemble that keeps the satire grounded.

The screenplay is adapted from Percival Everett's novel Erasure; the film won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2024 Oscars. Stream American Fiction (2023) online on iFILM.