![]() ![]() That’s not, ultimately, such a bad thing. This is a first film, and it has the overflowing quality of one made by someone intent on getting all of her best ideas in there in case she doesn’t get another chance. Another, involving the death of her artist mother a year ago and her ongoing mourning, is really just a bookend. ![]() The kids in the writing class Radha teaches could be a movie to themselves, a raucous, enthusiastic, frequently inappropriate bunch with a tendency to turn up at her events. The Forty-Year-Old Version, which draws from Blank’s own experiences in New York theater, keeps multiple story threads going, some of which are more explored than others. That friendship, which stretches back to Radha bearding for Archie at their high-school prom, is sweet and a little underdeveloped. When Radha’s agent and childhood bestie Archie (Peter Kim), who’s more willing and able to bend to the realities of the industry, tells her, “You are not above being a sellout,” she spirals out, enraged at the unfairness of his words and the fact that he might be right. Blank has a Gen-X sensitivity about commercial compromise, complicated by an awareness that it means something different when you’re also the only Black woman in the room. She’s making something for herself, in contrast to the collaboration she embarks on with Whitman (despite the party incident), making humiliating changes to her play that include inserting a white character and, yes, a hip-hop number. Her initial defensiveness about her own credibility aside, there’s a purity to the musical efforts she starts recording at the Brownsville apartment of a taciturn dreamboat of a producer named D (Oswin Benjamin), who in his persistence is the film’s most fanciful creation. Radha isn’t bad at rapping, but she isn’t the kind of instant phenom that record execs are going to be chasing down. To make, as she puts it, “poverty porn,” popping the p’s a little, until they feel percussive, and until a rhyme forms around the phrase that she wants to speak into a mic: You regular Blacks are just such a yawn / If I want to get on, better write me some poverty porn. It’s about someone who feels like the choices open to her are to struggle forever or to make work she’s ashamed to put her name on. The reality of the movie is significantly more rueful and less easily condensed. “Fortyish woman embarks on a hip-hop career” is an underdog story, the kind of quirky crowd-pleaser that gets picked up at Sundance - which is where Netflix bought Blank’s debut not long after its premiere. ![]() There’s a slyness to its elevator-pitch efficiency that’s paralleled in the way its main character has had to get in the habit of summarizing her work for various would-be funders. It’d go something like this: On the cusp of a big birthday, a struggling New York City playwright decides to reinvent herself as a rapper. The Forty-Year-Old Version is a likably diffuse movie about an artistic crisis intersecting with a midlife one, though its log line is catchier than that. But it’s when he tells her he still needs a writer for his Harriet Tubman musical that she feels the need to try to wrap her hands around his bow-tied neck, right there at the open bar, as though she could stop the sounds coming out of his mouth by force. He’s also the only game in town for Radha, at least when it comes to getting paid, and so she attempts to smile while he tells her that he found her new play about Harlem gentrification a little inauthentic, lacking in “darkness.” “I asked myself, did a Black person really write this?” he chuckles. He’s an unctuous type who’s built a career off art that’s serious enough to make the upscale white audience he caters to feel like they’re seeing something important but that’s in no danger of making that audience feel uncomfortable. Whitman (Reed Birney) is a guy who gets things on stage. Radha - played by Radha Blank, the film’s writer, director, producer, and star - is a playwright whose career has stalled out after a promising start, and J. It just kind of happens at a cocktail party. Radha doesn’t set out to assault the producer-king of the New York theater scene early in The Forty-Year-Old Version. Get past the goofy premise and Radha Blank’s debut, headed to Netflix, is about the frustrations of being a Black creator in a white theater scene. ![]()
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