A struggling playwright decides to reinvent herself as a rapper in “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” this year’s winner of Sundance’s Directing Prize. Written and directed by Radha Blank, the black and white comedy tells the story of Radha (Blank), a New Yorker grieving the loss of her mother, an artist, and determined to have a creative breakthrough before 40. The former up-and-comer was featured in Spotlight Magazine’s 30 under 30 Playwrights to Watch list, but in the decade or so since, she’s completely fallen off the radar, and is getting by with teaching, a job she told herself she’d never do.
Exhausted by the racism and gatekeeping of the theater world, Radha decides to make a mix tape “about the 40-year-old woman’s point of view” — her songs see her sounding off on everything from Sciatica to what she dubs “poverty porn.” The latter refers to the types of stories about Black characters that white producers are pressuring Black creatives to tell. She raps, “No happy Blacks in the plotlines, please / But a crane shot of Big Momma crying on her knees / For her dead son, the b-ball star, who almost made it out / Sounds fucked-up enough to gain my film some capital.”
Since Radha’s not interested in writing an “all-white play” or a “slave musical,” she hopes that rapping will be a more fulfilling creative outlet, and it is — at first. When she bombs at her first public performance as a rapper and is offered the opportunity to have her play produced, Radha immediately pivots back to theater. But her high profile return to the stage is not at all what she hoped. Her cringe-inducing white producer insists on rewrites, demanding that her play about Harlem gentrification include a major white character and a rap number. Her request for a Black director is originally granted, but eventually denied. Radha’s play becomes less and less recognizable, and she agrees to every stupid suggestion while hating herself for feeling like a sellout. It’s painful to watch the process play out: Radha shrinks smaller and smaller as the play gets closer to opening night.
When we asked Blank what drew her to the story, she said, “It was less about being drawn and more like an exorcism. I had to get it out. I had experienced so much rejection and loss over a period of time I had to perform and create to get through it.” She continued, “‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’ gave me a place to work through a lot of my grief from losing my mother and get over my fears around turning 40, but the movie also gave me a chance to insert a not-often-seen character into the canon of New York stories. I’m a native New Yorker and just wanted to celebrate that.”
Funny, observant, and fresh, Blank’s first feature marks an auspicious — and uncompromising — debut. The film feels like the antithesis of the play at its center: the product of its creator’s singular version.
“The Forty-Year-Old Version” is now streaming on Netflix.
