There’s a moment in The Forty-Year-Old Version when frustrated playwright Radha becomes so enraged by an elderly white theatre producer that she has to be physically prevented from throttling him. He has just suggested that, if she’s unwilling to put a white character at the heart of her play about the gentrification of Harlem, she might like to help out with a forthcoming musical about the 19th-century abolitionist Harriet Tubman instead.
It raises the question – how close is the film to the life of its director and star, Radha Blank, who has also spent decades beating at the door of New York’s predominantly white theatre establishment? “I have not actually choked a theatre producer… yet,” she says, “just like I’ve never won a 30 under 30 award and I’ve not had a relationship specifically with a hip-hop producer in his 20s from Brownsville. But that character [D, played by newcomer Oswin Benjamin] is an amalgam of a lot of people I’ve dated, people I’ve met in music, and I tend to skew younger, so that part is true.”
Her frankness is both endearing and surprising. We’re five minutes into a Zoom interview about her debut film, which was a sleeper hit of this year’s Sundance festival, winning her the directing award for US drama and a nomination for the grand jury prize. Like its maker, the film is a life-affirming, in-your-face blast of fresh air that is perfectly timed to blow up a storm on the energy released by the Black Lives Matter movement. “It traces the rebirth of an artist with lacerating insight, a great deal of warmth and terrific comic timing,” said the New York Times, noting that its black-and-white palette recalled the iconic New York films of Woody Allen and Spike Lee.
Blank cites Lee’s 1986 movie, She’s Gotta Have It, as one of her biggest influences, and a few years ago Lee invited her to join his writers’ room for the TV follow-up, which ran from 2017 to 2019. It was one of a succession of writing gigs in the past decade, including Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down, about musical youth in the Bronx, and the record industry soap opera Empire, which for Blank put an end to years of grafting away in children’s TV while going nowhere in her first love, theatre.
“I have about 12 plays that haven’t seen the light of day and became my writing samples for TV,” she says. “I’m one of the most known unproduced black playwrights. When I have a reading, people turn up. We’re hungry for each other. They need me as a playwright and I need them as actors, but I’ve only had a couple of readings and one major production.”
In the film, Radha’s failure to break through is compounded by her 40th birthday and the death of her artist mother. There’s a poignant scene where she and her brother take stock of her mother’s paintings. When she made the film, Blank herself had just emerged from two months “curled in a ball”, grieving for her own mother, who was an artist and “my chief cheerleader”. Radha is “about 65% me,” she says, “but some of my friends are playing my friends in the film and all of the family photos are real: that’s my mom’s artwork, that’s my dad’s music, that’s my brother. So certain elements are very true.”
Part of the survival strategy of both Radhas is to reinvent themselves as a comedy rapper, RadhaMUSprime, whose name – Blank says she didn’t realise it at the time – was subliminally inspired by Rodimus Prime, a character in her favourite childhood robot superhero series, Transformers (“There’s a moment from it that I use to open my shows, where RadhaMUSprime is fighting Megatron. I tried to get it in the movie, but without success.”)
Unlike Radha in the film, Blank has never freaked out on stage. “Performing at Joe’s pub, in little dives in Brooklyn, in Norway – this was part of my healing,” she says. “RadhaMUSprime as an alter ego really did save me. What I love about hip-hop music is if you have a skill with a pen it really doesn’t matter what you look like. I used RadhaMUSprime to celebrate having a May to December romance, and I have a fat girl sex anthem. In my normal life I’m always dieting, whereas RadhaMUSprime doesn’t care. She celebrates her rolls!”
The Forty-Year-Old Version is part satirical howl of rage at racial disadvantage in the theatre, and part love song to New York, where she and her brother were raised as part of an “intentional artist community” whose members spent their downtime renovating dilapidated lofts and storefronts. “I was raised around artists,” she says. “It was nothing for a jam session to start off in our house; for different activists and artists to pontificate in our kitchen, smoking a little weed, and having their arguments until 3am. People l call my aunties and uncles – black, brown, Jewish.”
Her father is a jazz drummer from a dynasty of musicians, and her “uncle” Gerry Eastman still owns the Williamsburg Music Center in Brooklyn. “In that place I saw everyone from Cassandra Wilson to Joshua Redman, people who today are jazz luminaries but who were then young musicians in their 20s just trying to figure things out. So creating art was never a question. It was what we did, not necessarily as a vocation.”
By the time she got to her teens, Blank began to see the downside of such a lifestyle – “struggling to pay bills, needing a little government assistance, expected to wear the same pair of jeans three times a week. I was a little embarrassed, so instead of becoming an artist I went to business school.” She ended up excelling in all the school talent shows. “It’s something I could not escape, it’s part of who I am. I just had to figure out how to make a living at it,” she says. “Then I came to Spike’s work and thought that’s someone who’s making a living and who looks like me.”
As a child, Blank would watch films over the shoulder of her cinephile mother. “The reason I had to shoot the film in black and white is that there’s nothing more New York than a black and white film, and in my own way I’m retrofitting the film back into a canon that I love from the 70s and 80s, telling a story that should have been told all those years ago: this is another [type of] New Yorker. I’m a New Yorker. It’s just that the camera was angled in one direction and we had to pivot it over here.” It was also, she says, about seeing New York’s urban culture through a more sophisticated lens. “Hip-hop is often oversexualised, oversaturated. Black and white brings it to a level of cool and vulnerability that we don’t often see it at.”
The film was originally intended to be a 10-episode web series. Her mother’s death, just as she was preparing to shoot the first two episodes, put an end to that – but also raised her sights. “I feel like failure is a great tool in comedy,” she says. “Adversity is a great polisher of the mirror of life.”
Mirrors are a motif in the film. “I’m using the comedy and the failure and the adversity to polish the character’s mirror. It’s sometimes obscured, sometimes foggy, sometimes she can’t see her reflection. When a black woman is up on screen she usually fits into maybe five tropes: the sassy best friend, the all-knowing oracle, the hands-on-hips ‘Oh no you don’t!’ type… I’m in favour of the black woman on screen looking into herself. That’s what I’m a champion of.”
Though the bulk of Blank’s satire is aimed at the white theatre establishment – the smug producer and the sleek socialite investors – she’s not above a dig at her multi-ethnic peers. There’s a comic riff on a pretentiously mystical black arts scene, as well as a sharp dig at crowd-pleasing hip-hop musicals. Did she by any chance have the work of Lin-Manuel Miranda in mind, in particular his streetlife musical In the Heights? “You picked up on that? Holy shit!” she chortles, with a shake of her glamorous gold braids.
Then she dials back to serious. “When it comes to theatre in an urban environment, particularly musical theatre, it’s pretty much the same setup: this exciting place where everything is pointed at this one voice that’s speaking for the street. Then there’s poverty porn. This is not a criticism of Lin-Manuel, who is one of our genius scribes. What I’m critical of is that institutions don’t put up more plays by people of colour about the inner city, so we have a range of stories.”
It just so happens that Blank has a few of them in her back pocket. “Seed [her one play that did have a full production, at New York’s National Black Theatre, in 2011] is a story that takes place in Harlem and people actually speak in rhyme, but there’s a little bit more depth than the usual representations.” It’s about a gifted child and the woman who tries to help him fulfil his potential.
Then there’s her TV calling card, Casket Sharp, about a young graduate who returns to his decayed home town to settle his dead father’s funeral business, only to get caught up in a row about funeral rites between the mother of a young dead man and his gang family. She turned down the chance of turning it into a TV series because “I didn’t know whether I wanted to create a show where people were tuning in every week to black death, even though they were saying it’s our version of Six Feet Under.”
She gives another shake of her head and concludes that, despite all her setbacks: “there are just some things that should be on the stage: I’ll never be done with theatre, I’m just hoping that maybe now theatre will take a chance on me.” She’s well aware of the irony that the worlds of television and film, which initially seemed so much more remote and glamorous, should have proved more welcoming. “But the beauty of this moment is that there’s no denying it. I am officially a film director. I made a film.”
• The Forty-Year-Old Version is in select cinemas now, and on Netflix from 9 October
