Review: A Terrific Debut In ‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’

The play that shes working on is about a Black couple living in a gentrified Harlem. The local Black theater company wont make it, so she pressures her agent and friend Archie (Peter Y. Kim) to look for other options. It lands her an audience with a respected producer J. Whitman (Reed Birney), who has the money and the connections but also only seems to produce Black poverty porn plays for white audiences.

Her conflict over whether to make an inauthentic play the way Whitman would want (more white people, more about gentrification, more Black stereotypes) or to use her voice elsewhere (she tries rapping about her life) propels the film. The journey is filled with funny and cringey moments as she attempts to find herself and her voice. Blank is an excellent, empathetic and hilarious lead and shes surrounded herself with an ace supporting cast, including Kim, Birney and Oswin Benjamin as a big-hearted music producer.

At its heart, The Forty-Year-Old Version is a wry commentary about who gets to make art and which voices we celebrate, although you dont exactly need a study to tell you that Black women are some of the least represented voices in filmmaking. This is exactly why Blank chose the title she did. Its not an accident that The Forty-Year-Old Version sounds like another famous movie title. She meant to appropriate Judd Apatows The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, made by a filmmaker who loves a long comedy about a protagonist (usually a white man) just figuring it out. Its not meant to be mean to Apatow or his film and the specific connections end there, but the Apatowian genre is one that not many others get to make. She even decided that hers would be as long as his, which may have been her only mistake, but its a funny gesture nonetheless.

We dont generally bring out any fanfare for artists who make their first film or play or album in their 40s or beyond, as though its any less impressive. In some ways, its probably harder. The Forty-Year-Old Version makes a compelling case for another set of lists: The 40-Over-40. They deserve it just as much, if not more.