In the wake of the nation’s (latest) reckoning with race, you may have noticed a few new faces on your favorite streaming service. Categories like “Black Stories” on Hulu and Amazon Prime’s “Black Voices,” have been curated to promote Black filmmakers and performers while capitalizing on this summer’s collective appraisal of Black lives. Tapping into my teen years, Netflix has added a growing list of sitcoms from the 1990s – an apex era for Black comedy on network TV. Revisiting shows like Moesha, Girlfriends, and The Game, I’m reminded of how stories back then regularly normalized and celebrated the spectrum of Black life in the U.S. – especially the diverse perspectives of the broad Black middle class. They also threw a spotlight on the lives of Black women, presenting them as strong, funny, and fiercely independent, but also sensitive, vulnerable, and often overlooked. In bringing back these programs, Netflix has set the stage for its new original film, The Forty-Year-Old Version. Loosely based on the life of writer, director, and star Radha Blank, the movie follows her personal and professional mishaps as a struggling, New York playwright. Quick-witted, ambitious, though worn down by the hustle, Radha could easily fit on the sets of the sitcoms named above. Like those shows, The Forty-Year-Old Version invites us to reimagine the roles that Black artists, especially Black female artists, can and should play, both on and off the set.
It’s been a decade since Radha won a “30 Under 30” award, and she’s done little else since. She’s now a high school Drama teacher in search of a hit and some respect; as one student derides, “She ain’t no Tyler Perry.” Radha’s got a play in the works, but she can’t get beyond a workshop production at an underfunded Black theatre space. “Where’s my regional production?” she fusses. “Like, what I gotta do? Write a slave musical? An all-white play? Like, who do I have to blow around here?” she demands a bit too loudly. It’s a funny, but revealing moment about the path to mainstream success for Black artists in the entertainment industry. While “diverse” prestige films may place BIPOC characters at the center of the action and yield stellar, award-winning performances from Black actors, they often support a long-standing industry tradition, in which Black trauma and Black bodies are put on display in the name of Black visibility, a tradition in which Black stories are re-designed to reflect the redemptive potential of White American society.
This proves a problem for Radha, whose latest play, Harlem Ave, is a simple tale “about a young Black man who inherits a grocery store from his dead mom and pop, and how he struggles to keep the business afloat with the help of his lovely wife, who’s an activist.” That’s not enough bite for a prospective producer (Reed Birney) – a White man – who, after reading the script, remarks on Radha’s “inauthentic” depiction of Black life. “I wish you hadn’t shied away from darkness,” he says. “I mean, if you’re going to call it Harlem Ave, you gotta give me ‘Harlem Ave.’” It’s clear what he means, given his reputation for staging, what Radha calls “poverty porn.” And it’s again a testament to the reductive view of Black experiences, and the limitation placed on Black content creators looking to depict those experiences. Dejected, Radha is left alone in her apartment, eating ribs in the dark, crying out “I just want to be an artist!” to no one in particular.
That is, until she catches a beat… and an idea.
“Yo, where my period at?” she spits at her reflection in the mirror. “Oh shit, there it go / Right next to the belly bloating / And this spotty flow.” A notepad in hand, she rhymes with the brashness of a budding Brooklyn MC, and the trepidation of an actor at her first audition. “Yo, where my damn house keys / Why my lower legs hurt / Sci-atica locked legs / Like Attica, word.” As the lyrics flow, we see an identity form – not Radha, exactly, but another version of her; someone louder, more fearless and uncompromising; self-assured even in the midst of self-discovery. “Why my skin so dry / Why am I yawning right now / Why them AARP niggas / Sending shit to my house?” By the end of her verse, hoodie thrown over her head, she’s Radha no more. Enter: RadhaMUSPrime, a rapper who moves to her own rhythm… or, would if it weren’t for her cracking joints. “Yeah, I tried to dance hard / But my knees straight caught me / Cause, yo / This is forty, nig-gas / This is forty!”
Radha’s alter ego becomes her outlet. As RadhaMUSPrime, she’s infused with an energy that she hasn’t felt since high school, “in the cafeteria, beating out beats on the table, rhyming all day and all night.” She’s inspired to create, and intends to produce a mixtape about – what else – the forty-year-old woman’s experience. RadhaMUSPrime, after all, embraces her age and, more importantly, the value of her voice. And with this newfound confidence, she’s also lucky in love, finding romance with D (Oswin Benjamin), a Brownsville beat maker with a soft voice and a smooth finish. It’s at his home studio that she lays down arguably her hottest track of the film: “A social commentary,” Radha explains, “about the White gaze’s eroticism of Black pain.” When the beat drops, RadhaMUSPrime reappears:
“…Let’s add some asthma attacks / From all the courtyard crack use, true / Current use is low / But I want my shit pro-duced, So / No happy Blacks / In the plotlines, please / But a crane shot of Big Mama / Crying on her knees…”
Her verses serve up “the most pathos-drenched story / That’s ever been seen,” evoking well-worn clichés about rampant sex, violence, and depravity in the Black community, downplaying “Huxtable achievements,” and almost daring her listeners to love it. “It’s poverty porn” goes the chorus. “You regular Blacks are just such a yawn / Yo, if I wanna get on / Better write me some poverty porn.” As RadhaMUSPrime, her goal is not only to make “real” music – “not that bullshit that my students listen to” – but to (re)establish her authentic voice in the only space afforded her, and to discover a reason to use that voice.
That reason may be found in the movie’s subplot involving Radha’s late mother. We learn that it’s been a year since she’s passed and Radha still hasn’t packed up her apartment. We also learn that Mom was an artist – a painter, primarily. But for all her talent and struggle (complete with squatting and government cheese) she never blew up the way she’d planned. It’s a legacy that Radha has trouble reconciling, given her own fight for relevance. “You come here with a dream, and your work ends up in storage,” she muses over the last of her mom’s paintings left hanging. It’s worth noting that Carol Blank, Radha’s mother in real life, was a visual artist who passed away in 2013.
The movie’s Radha views her mom’s life as a relative disappointment in light of her commercial failure. However, her brother, Ravi (played by actual brother, Ravi Blank) is quick to acknowledge that their mother’s legacy stretches beyond the paintings on the walls. “She was a teacher,” he says. “She was a curator. She chanted. She traveled. She did some art, she did some theatre. She lived a life.” She found her satisfaction in her art, but she found her purpose in her life. As Ravi reminds Radha, “She said that we were her greatest creation.”
Perhaps that’s what it’s all about: our influence, and what others do with that influence. In a way, The Forty Year-Old Version functions as a meta-work of the late Carol Blank. This point is brought home as Radha soberly freestyles: “Mama may I, say I / Wonder sometimes, like / Are you the person feeding these rhymes…” Beatmaker D credits his own mother for introducing him to John Coltrane, sparking his love for music. The film recognizes and honors the women who came before us: the creators, those who proved what was possible through their lives and their work; those who passed on to us permission to dream. This is why Radha’s position as a teacher is so significant. If she can just give Rosa (Hazkiri Valazquez) an outlet for her passion, get Waldo and Kamal (Antonio Ortiz, TJ Atoms) to respect the ladies, and convince Elaine (Imani Lewis) to love herself enough to love others, Radha will have fulfilled her role; if she can inspire others to harness their creative energy and tell their stories honestly, without compromise, then she will have carried on her mother’s legacy. What the movie suggests is that this potential for influence over our community can prove a greater, more powerful marker of success for Black artists than the approval and satisfaction of “the White gaze.”
