Review: The 40-Year-Old Version makes a subtle plaint about the challenges of making art—particularly for a Black woman–and movingly depicts the joy of creating something on one’s own terms.
There’s a certain kind of movie whose shtick has grown tired. It’s the “improbable person does improbable thing” genre: isn’t it wacky that such and such character is attempting such and such thing when, demographically, they shouldn’t be doing it? The modern iteration of this form probably started with the middle-aged-guys stripping smash. Which is why when I read the synopsis for, in which a nearing middle-aged playwright makes a career pivot to rap music, I was resistant.
Blank plays a version of herself, a nearing-40 playwright who won an award early in her career meant to enshrine her as one of the hot new talents on the New York theater scene. That distinction has since—as it so often does for people laden with praise at the outset—become both talisman and albatross. She can always point to it as a symbol of her promise; she can also point to it as a symbol of her promise unfulfilled.
The theater satire in the film is often spot-on, adeptly skewering the socioeconomics of commercial performing arts in New York in an era of compromised progress. Blank doesn’t call out any specific work or institutions, but her meaning is clear. There is a bottleneck when it comes to creatives of color entering these rarefied spaces, and so often the contortions required to make it through leave all sense of truth and individuality outside the bubble.
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