Radha Blank
Radha Blank’s debut film is easy to be charmed by, writes
The troughs and peaks of a life in the creative field can be exhausting, depleting and induce tsunami levels of anxiety and insecurity. Not everyone who is recognised in their youth as the next voice of their generation manages to capitalise on that acclaim and ride it all the way into their golden years. In fact, most of those tapped on the shoulder for great things in their youth often fail to deliver on the expectations and pressures such accolades come with.
Take the story of the semiautobiographical version of writer and director Radha Blank, played in her debut feature film by Radha Blank in a story written and directed by Radha Blank. In real life Blank is a playwright of some renown and success who’s moonlighted as a writer for the television series Empire and Spike Lee’s Netflix series adaptation of his film She’s Gotta Have It. In this version, Radha is a once celebrated playwright who used to be one of the hottest writers on the New York theatre scene and earned a celebrated spot on a coveted 30 under 30 list. Now she’s a hasbeen who hasn’t produced a play in years, is teaching a bunch of disinterested public schoolkids drama, and only has her longsuffering high school bestie and agent Archie (Peter Y Kim) for companionship and what tenuous link she might still have to the theatre scene that’s forgotten her and left her behind. When her independent, bohemian artist mother dies, and with the big Four Zero fast approaching, Radha is lost at sea, creatively blocked, unfulfilled and not sure what she plans to do with the cellphone interviews she’s recorded of colourful neighbourhood characters telling her she needs to get laid, stop worrying about her age and get up and do something with her life. When Archie secures her a meeting with a powerful Broadway producer (Reed Birney) who tells her that her new play is not very good but that he does need someone to write his planned Harriet Tubman musical, Radha rightfully but unfortunately seems to end what small hopes she had of picking her career back up by choking him. One night, during a particularly piteous bout of selfloathing and whining, she starts to rap, and it turns out she’s quite good at it. It offers her a chance for reinvention through a new form that allows her to reconnect with some of the piercing clarity and honesty that once
characterised her plays. Archie is dubious but Radha is determined, furiously scribbling rhymes and creating the comedic hip-hop persona of RadhaMUSprime (Blank’s actual real-life rap moniker). And so things begin to look up for Radha Blank, onetime hot-shit young playwright, now weird but intriguing older-lady-feminist rapper. But of course, life is always more complicated than stories would have us believe, and Radha’s own anxieties and self-delusions threaten to upend her and her relationships at every turn.
Shot in low-fi black and white and scored by a laidback jazz soundtrack, this is a smart, empathetic examination of the manifold layers of creative life that’s also a love letter to a fast-fading, soon to be completely gentrified New York. It consciously evokes Lee’s debut film She’s Gotta Have It in look and feel and theme, but it’s more empathetic towards the challenges faced by women both in the creative sphere and in early middle age. It also makes some pertinent and smart satirical points about the thorny terrain that black American artists face in creating work that’s true to their lived experience without bowing to the paternalist but not too confrontational requirements of the tastes of white gatekeepers and their ideas of what black art should be.
Blank has all the talent — in her writing, direction and sly comic timing as an actress. The cracking sound her knees make every time she bends are a running joke that’s always funny. It’s perhaps a tad too long but its meandering, thoughtful and loving look at life in the Big Apple is easy to be charmed by, and it leaves you with plenty to think about while quietly laughing at its many moments of uncomfortable recognition.
This is a smart, empathetic examination of the manifold layers of creative life