The Forty-Year-Old Version

Dir: Radha Blank (2hrs 4mins) (15)

★★★★

“A star is born, albeit at the ripe age of 44”, as writer, director and actor Radha Blank seizes her moment with “this whip-smart comedy”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Blank plays her alter ego, also called Radha, a black New York playwright who once appeared on a “30 Under 30” list of talents to watch. Now aged 40, she’s struggling to earn a living by teaching an after-school theatre programme and working on a mawkish drama about “the black experience” for a wealthy Broadway producer (Reed Birney). Her sense that she has failed to live up to her early promise prompts a personal crisis and, to the horror of her theatrical contacts, she reinvents herself as rapper RadhaMUSprime, forging lyrics from her midlife angst – and falling in love with sensitive rap impresario D (Oswin Benjamin).

The “promise of empowerment” suggested by this surprise career shift could have lead to “clichéed uplift”, said Danny Leigh in the FT, but the film is too “smart” for that. Blank is “very funny on the indignities visited on the artist as a middle-aged woman – crises of confidence, looming sciatica”. And she gives a wryly witty take on the pressure black writers feel to create “tales of black poverty” for white producers and audiences. The film is shot on black-and-white 35mm, maybe as a homage to early Spike Lee, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, but it has “a distinctive language of its own, and a feel for the city”. It’s a “rangy, laid-back” comedy (perhaps a little over-long), with “an interesting tang of disillusionment”.

Available on Netflix and in cinemas.