American Fiction has a very droll premise and many sharp lines, as you'd expect from an adaptation of a Percival Everett novel.

If the overarching drama here is meant to be an example of the more universal human stories that black writers and film-makers want to tell, it doesn't make a fully satisfying whole. The film is about 30 minutes of scabrous satire interrupting 90 minutes of rather tedious and uninvolving famililial stife.

Perhaps that's the even slyer point that Everett and Jefferson are making - that they have the right to be black and boring. If so, it came across to me very effectively, as I was checking my watch constantly in the second hour.