The directorial debut of acclaimed television writer Cord Jefferson, American Fiction, starts off so well it’s exhilarating. Based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, it’s a scathing satire of the god-awful trap of being creatively gifted and black in contemporary America, where the overlapping academic, publishing, and entertainment fields are maddeningly racist in the modern way. That is, with lots of mortifying double-talk about allyship, as long as what gets created is the black “trauma porn” especially revered by white liberals, featuring lots of whipped slaves, pregnant teenagers, deadbeat dads, rapping, shooting crack, and anguished gangstas in the ’hood spouting melodramatic speeches before they gun somebody down.

From the beginning, Jeffrey Wright is entirely deserving of his Academy Award for Best Actor nomination in the lead role of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. He plays a frustrated black author and academic whose erudite novels, which are updated reworkings of ancient Greek plays, don’t sell. Placed on academic leave after several testy exchanges with students on the topic of race, he attends a literary conference and watches a rival author named Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) worshipfully interviewed on a television talk show about her new bestseller, We’s Lives in da Ghetto.

Watching her, Wright allows Monk’s frozen reaction to break with just one tiny eyebrow wrinkle that is hilarious for the immense levels of incredulous contempt it represents. Wright’s always great, but who knew he was so funny?