Radha Blank: ‘Audiences find black pain sexy’

I love it. What else do you have?” Radha Blank has lost track of the number of times she has heard these eight words in the 20 or so years of trying to get her plays produced. Over the phone, the playwright – she only very recently dropped the “struggling” prefix – explains the hidden meaning behind the backhanded compliment: “What they’re really telling me is, ‘You’re talented but please can you write something that appeals to our membership?’” By membership, she means the liberal, rich, white artistic directors, literary agents and financiers who define New York’s theatre scene.

Her answer to them? A resounding, howling no. Instead, Blank took the criticism and wrote it into her first feature film The Forty-Year-Old Version. The movie, which was shot in 21 days on 35-millimetre black-and-white film, became a sleeper hit of this year’s Sundance festival. It secured a Netflix deal just six days later.

The film that Blank painstakingly, meticulously and lovingly wrote, directed and starred in borrows much more from her life than her frustrations with the industry. In it, she plays Radha, a lightly fictionalised version of herself – a playwright stuck in a rut. Radha is a black woman living in Harlem, the previous winner of a “30 under 30” award, an accolade that has in the nine years since translated into a big fat nothing. She lives alone and is mourning the loss of her mother, who died a year ago. Flailing in her career, Radha finds an alternate artistic outlet as hip-hop artist RhadaMUS Prime – yes, she named her alter-ego after her favourite Transformer.

Blank first wrote the film as a 10-episode web series. It was her way of taking control after too many unsuccessful meetings. When she was let go from her first official screenwriting job adapting a best-selling book in 2014, writing the show was her way of channelling that rejection. As Blank puts it, she’s the Taylor Swift of filmmaking. (Swift first made a name for herself mining real-life heartbreaks for best-selling songs.)

Although she had worked in various writing rooms (“some cool ones and some very dysfunctional ones”), including Spike Lee’s 2017 TV reboot of She’s Gotta Have It and Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down, it was the first time that Blank felt she had everything she needed to make a feature: people who supported her and enough control to enact her vision. Because, for once, she wasn’t just writing; she was producing and starring too. But two weeks before filming began, her mother died. Blank scrapped the show.

“It devastated my life,” she says. They were incredibly close. They shared the same birthday. To use Blank’s Golden Girls–based barometer of kinship, her mum was the Sophia to her Dorothy. “I didn’t want to create art because it didn’t make sense to me any more, not when my biggest champion and cheerleader is not here.” Instead, the filmmaker contemplated going back to university to become a social worker but landed on hip-hop instead.

“People think I invented RhadaMUS Prime for the film, but I began performing as my alter-ego around the time my mother passed away. It was a catharsis in getting through that grief.” Whereas she would be reduced to a puddle of tears and snot trying to reply to a simple “how you doing?” text, RhadaMUS Prime could rap about the sticky, all-consuming despair of grief without missing a beat. After two years of performing as a rapper in clubs across New York – and even one in Norway – Blank returned to her web series to rework it, first as a pilot and then a feature, writing in her mum’s death as the new connective tissue of her film.

Blank, who gives her current age as “deep into my forties”, is a generous interviewee. She is funny and candid. Perhaps you have to be when you put yourself out there like she does. And there is so much of the real Blank in The 40-Year-Old Version: her biting satire, her despair at what commerce can do to art. Her most intimate details, too, are present: the apartment in the movie is her own apartment; her dad’s jazz music is in fact her dad’s jazz music; her mother’s art adorns the walls; her brother is played by her real brother. Such a film would not be possible without a filmmaker who is prepared to excavate her own vulnerability in service of her character’s. Blank is willing to be known in the way that a journalist wants to know her.

But that doesn’t mean sometimes she doesn’t need a little nudge. As well as eloquently parsing the emotions of loss, RadhaMUS Prime is also extremely apt at saying “f*** you” in situations when Blank can’t. “I have this song called ‘If I Had a D***’ and it grew out of my frustrations at being one of just two women in a writers’ room with a bunch of men.” The guys, she notes, are people she still considers friends (“I don’t think many of us are above our conditioning,” she offers by way of a kind explanation). “But they would either interrupt me or downplay my ideas and then when the same idea came out of a man’s mouth, it would be celebrated. So I did this song and the chorus goes…” At this point, her voice seamlessly transforms into staccato rhythms to deliver me a brief verse – the lyrics to which would appear here only in a series of asterisks.

Recognition has been a long-time coming for Blank, the playwright was kicking about on the scene long before her debut film. In 2008, she was accepted into the prestigious Public Theatre’s Emerging Writers Group in New York. She came out of the programme with 12 plays that no one wanted to produce.

And it wasn’t for lack of talent or effort. It wasn’t even because Blank was writing black stories (as one producer informs Radha in the movie, “Women-of-colour playwrights are very hot right now”). It was because they weren’t the right type of black story. She explains that her writing is not historical; it is neither about slavery nor war-torn Africa; it isn’t about gangs. “Black stories are almost always connected to trauma. It feels like people are enamoured with that setting of poverty and pain,” she says, sounding a little disgusted. “They find black pain sexy.”

Much of the movie’s satire takes aim at this perverse preoccupation. It looks at how someone like Blank, a black female artist uninterested in producing the sort of grim material her industry wants from her, vies to be successful in that same industry. In The Forty-Year-Old Version, Radha garners some interest in her drama about a black couple called Harlem Ave. The producer, however, an archetypal theatre type named Josh Whitman, strong-arms her into a series of changes. One is to give one of her black leads an inexplicable Southern accent. Another is to add a hip-hop musical segment. She is also required to write in a white character in order to “give the core audience a way in to the play”, Whitman explains.

In his hands and those of his fellow artistic invaders (including a new director whose “all-male version of Steel Magnolias was amazing”), Radha’s drama is mutilated into something else altogether. It becomes a play staged for white audiences who revel in the faux-authenticity and milquetoast social commentary on display. The movie asks exactly what Radha is willing to compromise to be a New York Times theatre pick? Thankfully, the answer turns out to be not a lot. 

The Forty-Year-Old Version stays true to her, well, version. Having finally arrived on the theatre scene,  Blank is not here to make concessions. The film is not an agonising story about trauma; even in its heavier moments it is suffused with laugh-out-loud satire and is buoyed by ebullient performances from new faces that you hope will become on-screen regulars.

That’s not to say people haven’t tried to change her tune. Despite her recent success, Blank confesses she still gets “some weird offers for s***”. When prompted for an example, she comes up with one so quickly, it’s clear that she’s had to endure many. The story is this: she is just coming off stage after receiving an award at the Palm Springs Film Festival when an older white male producer, a “very sweet guy”, runs up to her and says: “Congratulations! I can’t wait to see your film. I do want to tell you that I’m doing this movie about a runaway slave that you may be interested in?” At this point in rehashing the story, she pauses in faux-shock silence for five or so seconds before continuing with bemused outrage, “Like, did you not see my film? Did you not see my commentary about doing stuff that would make me feel like a sell-out?” In the movie, Radha throttles a producer after he follows up a dig at her script with a job offer on a musical about the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, as if to say that she, solely by being a black woman, is perfect for the role. Real-life Blank, however, is yet to strangle anyone. 

In her forties, Blank is feeling more powerful than ever. She has booed at being called a late-bloomer in previous interviews. The auteur has long been poised for success; it’s the industry that has been slow to catch up with her. But now, with some momentum behind her, Blank will hopefully never have to hear: “What else do you have?” ever again. But who are we kidding, she probably will. 

‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’ is available to watch on Netflix