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Monk is a professor and writer by trade. He has written a book that publishers don't want, and teaches students who are too fragile to handle his candor. His agent tells him that publishers are looking for "African American books" which they both interpret to mean tales of "thug life" and not anything that Monk is offering - he is offended at the notion that his prior books are in African American literature at the bookstore. As a joke and really as an "I'll show you," Monk pens a novel that is so far down the thug rabbit hole, it is absurdist. And then the unthinkable... a publisher wants it, a Hollywood exec wants the movie rights - and he has to play the role of coming from the hood, rather than showing his elite and intellectual upbringing.
Having been suspended from his professorial job, Monk returns to his childhood home to be with his mother (whose mental capacity is declining) and his two siblings - both are doctors, his sister is divorced and his brother is divorcing having recently come out of the closet as gay. Plenty of family "dynamic" to work through there, and then the family faces tragic challenge after challenge. And all of this while he is pursuing a new relationship with his mother's charming next door neighbor (remember Erika Alexander from Living Single - she's back and she looks amazing), even if he is not quite ready to be a whole human engaged in a grown up relationship.
The thing about American Fiction is that it is at once satire and authentic. Unlike many Oscar nominees, it has moments that are so funny you might miss the next scene's dialogue because you are still laughing from the prior one. It is surely Jeffrey Wright's best performance of his career, and that's saying something. There are a lot of good contenders for Adapted Screenplay, and I think it might be that this was my favorite in the category. Cord Jefferson achieves something so real in the absurd, and it both plays out convincingly and mocks itself along the way. The film is superb.
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