Review: A writer reinvents herself in 'The Forty-Year-Old Version,' a comedy that introduces the world to the funny and captivating Radha Blank

Watching “The 40-Year-Old Version,” is hard not to fall a little in love with its writer-director-star Radha Blank, and to wish her debut feature worked better than it does.

Blank plays a character not unlike herself, a Brooklyn playwright trying to get her career on track. The play she’s writing is a tough-minded work about the effects of gentrification on married Harlem shipowners, but her options for producing it are a barely paying black theater or a rich white producer (Reed Birney) who will want her message watered down for rich white theater patrons.

Meanwhile, Radha is frustrated by her work teaching theater to high-school kids, while she’s facing 40 with no significant other and avoiding the pain of dealing with her late mother’s belongings.

What to do? Why, become a rapper, of course. She puts her anger into verse, and it sounds pretty good, if she says so herself. (The wry fourth-wall-breaking look at the camera tells us that.) She finds a DJ who goes by D (played by hip-hop musician Oswin Benjamin, in his acting debut), to lay down some beats for a potential mixtape — an idea that horrifies Radha’s agent Archie (Peter Kim), who has been Radha’s best friend since they were prom dates (she was his beard).

Blank aims to stuff so much into her movie that the elements work against each other. A subplot about a surly student (Imani Lewis) never pays off, for example. And the movie’s second half extends the joke about Radha’s compromised play far longer than is necessary. Maybe another pass through editing would tighten up the slack.

But there’s a lot to admire about “The 40-Year-Old Version,” from the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography to Kim’s funny supporting performance that puts a new twist on the sassy gay best friend. Blank herself is charismatic, witty and funny, and it’s too bad her movie blurs the line between self-empowering and self-indulgent.

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‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’

★★1/2

Available, starting Friday, October 9, streaming on Netflix. Rated R for pervasive language, sexual content, some drug use and brief nudity. Running time: 129 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 27, 2020, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.