‘I don’t really believe in race,’ says Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), literary professor and frustrated LA writer. His problem is that everybody else does; while Monk reflects the diversity of his own personal life in prose, publishers find his work ‘not black enough’. Writer-director Cord Jefferson’s debut, American Fiction, is a spry satire of the media culture wars of today, seen through one man’s agonised attempts to find success on his own terms.

Inundated with unhelpful black representations in the media, Monk creates a pseudonym (ex-con Stagg) and writes a spoof novel called My Pafology, revelling in the family issues, druggie stereotypes and negative depictions that Monk hates. Stagg’s book becomes a sensation, notably with patronising white readers: ‘white people think they want the truth but they don’t; they just want to be absolved,’ Monk concludes. But disguising himself as the gruff Stagg while on a prestigious literary panel, Monk finds himself open to a damaging unmasking.

American Fiction punctures the self-seriousness around black cultural stereotypes; avoiding attacks on real-world properties like Sapphire’s Push (which was subsequently made into the 2009 film Precious), fictional writer Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) is the nemesis Monk initially despises but comes to understand. There’s precise satire of today’s Hollywood via a crudely exploitative horror film called Plantation Annihilation and Sterling K Brown contributes riotous support as Monk’s flippant gay brother. Attitudes surrounding black culture are ripe for lampooning, but the joke has to be accurate; American Fiction hits a difficult target in a way that even the troubled Thelonious ‘Monk’ would approve of.

American Fiction is in cinemas from Friday 2 February.