Get past the goofy premise and Radha Blank’s debut, headed to Netflix, is about the frustrations of being a Black creator in a white theater scene
Photo: Jeong Park/Netflix Radha doesn’t set out to assault the producer-king of the New York theater scene early in The 40-Year-Old Version. It just kind of happens at a cocktail party. Radha — played by Radha Blank, the film’s writer, director, producer, and star — is a playwright whose career has stalled out after a promising start, and J. Whitman is a guy who gets things on stage.
The 40-Year-Old Version is a likably diffuse movie about an artistic crisis intersecting with a midlife one, though its log line is catchier than that. It’d go something like this: On the cusp of a big birthday, a struggling New York City playwright decides to reinvent herself as a rapper. There’s a slyness to its elevator-pitch efficiency that’s paralleled in the way its main character has had to get in the habit of summarizing her work for various would-be funders.
Radha isn’t bad at rapping, but she isn’t the kind of instant phenom that record execs are going to be chasing down. Her initial defensiveness about her own credibility aside, there’s a purity to the musical efforts she starts recording at the Brownsville apartment of a taciturn dreamboat of a producer named D , who in his persistence is the film’s most fanciful creation.
That friendship, which stretches back to Radha bearding for Archie at their high-school prom, is sweet and a little underdeveloped. The 40-Year-Old Version, which draws from Blank’s own experiences in New York theater, keeps multiple story threads going, some of which are more explored than others. The kids in the writing class Radha teaches could be a movie to themselves, a raucous, enthusiastic, frequently inappropriate bunch with a tendency to turn up at her events.
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