Nearly three decades ago, Robert Altman’s poison pen dark comedy The Player decimated the notion of authentic Hollywood endings in which characters get what they deserve. Building on this grand meta tradition, writer/director Cord Jefferson’s subversive comedy American Fiction (B+) confronts the relationship between contemporary Black authors, their fraught notions of cultural representation in modern culture and the preposterous prism of white guilt placing unrealistic limits about how far the writers can go to transcend stereotypes. The high-concept plot in which the sanctimonious hero harbors a criminal alter ego and fictional characters “from the hood” sometimes spring to life from his mind into his writing room largely serves its purpose even if it sometimes leaves its protagonist pretzeled into remaining believable within the story’s constraints. In a brilliant performance of nuance and subtle physicality, Jeffrey Wright portrays an idealistic novelist fed up with establishment industries profiting from “Black entertainment” that relies on tired and offensive tropes. Under a pseudonym, he writes an urban opus of his own to showcase the heights of hypocrisy in the publishing world, and his character grapples with a series of results both profound and outlandish. The best sequence pits Wright and the talented Issa Rae in one-on-one repartee about “selling out” that speaks volumes; tellingly it’s the film’s one discussion about art with the spotlight exclusively on two minorities. Sterling K. Brown and Leslie Uggams are among the standouts in the wonderful ensemble, adding heft to the family drama surrounding the lead character’s literary conundrum. Their domestic ups and downs wouldn’t ever get the greenlight without the high-concept surrounding them, posits the filmmaker. The razor-sharp daggers pointed at material designed to be “Oscar bait” coupled with depiction of critics looking to applaud avant-garde authorship deliver ample episodes of cringeworthy comedy, and it’s all imminently watchable, entertaining and insightful. With Wright as the magnetic anchor for the pointed parody, Jefferson delightfully pulls off one of the most memorable movies of the year.