For its first 100-ish minutes, American Fiction builds to the moment when Jeffrey Wright’s character Thelonious “Monk” Ellison confronts Issa Rae’s Sintara Golden. In both the film and its source material, Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, frustrated academic Monk is haunted by We’s Lives in Da Ghetto— Golden’s poverty-porn bestseller that, to him, represents everything wrong with society’s expectations for Black art. Its success inspires Monk to write his own satirical book tailored to the white gaze. At first, he calls it My Pafology. Then he changes the title to Fuck.

In Everett’s book, Monk never directly encounters the author of Ghetto. But writer-director Cord Jefferson knew he wanted to put these two on a collision course. Because Wright’s performance is so good, the filmmaker and screenwriter explains, “it’s easy to start looking at him as a hero, and at Sintara as a villain.” The truth, of course, is more complicated.

Their eventual confrontation reveals the limits of Monk’s blinkered worldview. “It effectively got us free from the idea that this movie was out to finger-wag—a Bill Cosby rant where he’s telling young Black men to pull up their pants and behave themselves, and that’s how we end racism,” says Jefferson. The conversation’s a mind-expanding moment for his film’s protagonist, and then some. Says Jefferson, “I wrote the thing, and I still don’t know whose side I’m on when I leave it.”