To be honest, on paper, the film really shouldn't work. It's got so many "big" ideas and throughlines, by rights it should be all too much or nowhere nearly enough. And yet? It absolutely does work, and does so with a kind of naturalness that is kind of amazing.

Certainly it helps that the cast is uniformly excellent, starting of course with Geoffrey Wright who is in just about every scene. The main throughline of course is "frustrated writer who's tired of being passed by lesser works decides to write a satirical "Black" novel under an assumed name." Naturally, his shallow and stereotypical book immediately gets more interest than his real novels ever do, and now the train has left the station... As his agent so aptly declares: First rule of sales, never assume your customers are too smart to make a bad choice."

But the interesting thing here is that this storyline is at most ¼ of the overall plot, and at times much less important that what else is going on. There's his aging mother, the fallout of growing up a troubled dysfunctional household, the hope for intimacy vs the fear of letting others in, and much more. It never feels rushed or too crowded, giving everyone just the right amount of room to play things out.

There are bits of The Player and maybe even echos of Mel Brooke's along the way, but mostly it's all very much its own thing.