American Fiction

“Once you go full black, you ain't never going back!”

Publishers keep rejecting Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a novelist and professor, because his books aren't "Black enough," while a book full of stereotypes tops the bestseller lists. Furious, he writes his own version under a pen name, as a joke. Cord Jefferson sets that scheme against Monk's family, where his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) and his brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) need more from him than he knows how to give.