I saw the fawning critical response to this film when it played the festival circuit, and as I'm always interested in stories about the African American experience so thought I'd give it a go.

Anything that addresses the longtime racism inherent in so much of America's history is almost automatically held up as a creative classic nowadays regardless of its quality, simply because race is such a hot button issue in American society and the kind of thing that wins awards in movies, so I was interested to see if it was worth all the praise.

In this case, despite all the creative elements being high quality, it just didn't hang together effectively enough. It tells the story of a mild-mannered literature professor, Thelonious Ellison (Geoffrey Wright), called 'Monk' by his family and friends for obvious reasons.

He wants to teach a class that touches on the history of race relations in America without any of the attendant socio-political baggage or political correctness. As he tells another character, he doesn't even consider himself a particular race, even as an African American himself. But when he wants to discuss Flannery O'Connor's The Artificial Nigger, a (white) student takes offence at the use of the word on the whiteboard and walks out of the class in protest.

The altercation – and his not being sensitive enough to the proscribed handling of issues around race sensitivity – see him put on administrative leave from his post, the academic equivalent of being cancelled.

To make matters worse, his career as a writer is stalling, with his books selling poorly even though they're critically well received, and his latest project is rejected by every publisher in town for not being 'black' enough. It's a label Monk bristles at, especially when a young female writer is being gushed over in the press for a book he thinks panders to black stereotypes and becomes a bestseller.

He goes back to his hometown of Boston to spend time with his family during his forced leave, reconnecting with his sassy sister, gay brother and their mother, who's starting to go downhill because of Alzheimer's. He starts seeing the pretty lawyer who lives across the street from their beach house, tries to deal with the vagaries of his familial life (which includes resentments over who stayed and left to take care of their ailing mother), and gets on with his life.

But when the costs of their mother's care start to manifest and mount up and their sister suddenly and tragically dies, Monk knows he and his brother need to do something.

Frustrated at his lack of financial success and still resentful at the golden girl author who's making a fortune and becoming famous for writing a politically hip but vacuously empty 'black' book, Monk writes a riotously, ridiculously pandering memoir by a fictitious writer expressing the black experience that leans into the clichés even harder, a kind of creative protest which he sends off to publishers with contempt, half expecting them to realise he's just exposing the whole scam.

Then, when they fall over themselves to sign it, his agent is overjoyed at the coming stardom and money, convincing Monk to roll with it despite the latter's disgust at how shallow the whole exercise is.

He reluctantly agrees, posing as the fictional author in secret, not agreeing to any on-camera interviews and conducting phone calls to the publisher and marketing exec with a ridiculous, pantomime voice of a ghetto gangbanger, one that doesn't come at all naturally to him and provides the movie's few moments of outright comedy.

When Monk is assigned to judge a fiction prize alongside the golden girl author who inspired the whole plan to call the industry out on its hypocritical trade in stereotypes, he has to ride the wave of his impending fame and fortune in secret, feeling like he's on an out of control train of his own making, painfully aware his act of satire has made him part of the problem he always railed against.

Both stories work and as I said above, they're both high quality and feel authentic, with great performances and relationships that appear perfectly honest. The problem is that they're two stories, and I'm still struggling to figure out how they were supposed to work together.

The real story the film seemed like it was trying to tell was the satire of a smart author trying to expose how the media industry is always chasing the hot new thing regardless of whether it's any good rather than find voices of quality and honesty (and race is just the contemporary issue that raises the most hackles in America and gets the most media airtime).

Then there was the familial struggle of trying to reconnect with his sister and her unexpected death, trying to get his brother interested in taking care of their mother, the new girlfriend, etc.

It took up far more time in the plot but it felt like the secondary story. The stuff I thought writer/director Cord Jefferson was really trying to say (bought into the sharpest focus in the phone calls with the publisher of the fake memoir) took up hardly any time, and I didn't care enough about anything else.

Finally, like plenty of other American movies those of us around the rest of the world are simply bemused by (see Transformers: Rise of the Beasts for another example), it's also the story about how if you need healthcare in the modern US for something like a parent with Alzheimer's, you better be a rich author or you'll end up bankrupt.