Review: "The 40-Year-Old Version" is an Entertaining Reason for Why All Voices Deserve to Be Heard

Scene from The 40-Year-Old Version

For everyone, growing old has its share of nightmares. It's the fear of losing your vitality, an inability to connect with a world that thrives on youth. For most people, it's a struggle that has its own workarounds, but not if you're on the verge of becoming a 40-year-old Black woman. In Radha Blank's directorial debut, she does an impressive job of exploring self-expression at an age when nobody wants to listen, instead of asking you to compromise your vision to the tried and true. What Blank argues in The 40-Year-Old Version is not what the value of success is, but whether or not it is important to be true to yourself. With a debut, she bears her soul with an urgency that recalls a perspective not often allowed in the cinema. As a result, it feels at times breathtaking as well as frustrating, realizing how many other voices out there are being ignored, crushed by expectations of a society that doesn't like you unless you fit certain conventions.

The layers to understanding Blank's world as massive, ranging from the trivial to something more abstract. In an opening sequence, she interviews random people, revealing that she's 40-years-old. In every case, there's no sense of celebration. It's the idea that she either looks younger or that a being single is a curse. There's so much taboo to Radha throughout the film. Even the fact that she once won a 30 Under 30 trophy as a playwright means little now. She's a near-decade after her last major accomplishments on the stage, a fact that her students constantly rib her for. It's the type of attitude that follows the "if you can't do, then teach" logic, finding her questioning her own self-worth. She tries to foster the creativity of her students, and all they can do is write juvenile poems about their anatomy.

But there is a reason that Radha wanted to tell this story. It's not one about self-pity, but an effort to find self-worth in a society that has passed her by. She wants to be a playwright again. She wants to believe that she has the vitality to rap like the young kids who arrive at the producer's apartment, full of aspiration and hope, believing that they can make it last forever. Even then, they can't always buy Radha even as she's giving in to these vital, aggressive lyrics about "poverty porn" and social commentary of growing old. These are forms of expression rarely given to people her age, and it becomes clear not only in her rap career but the direction of her theater career.

Like the best of indie dramas, this is a story full of rich perspective. With Blank doing heavy duty directing, writing, and acting in this, she presents a story that feels like it's been rooted deep inside of her. Small conversations with her theater pal, Archie (Peter Kim) works as this delightful example of older colleagues who understand them enough. Archie has her back, able to protect her from harm though is not above a sassy conversation. Together they conquer the world of financing her next show, Harlem Ave., which has the unfortunate duty of being financed by a rich white man named Josh Whitman (Reed Birney) who believes that Radha's vision isn't authentic, needing to add white characters as supporting players "for the audience." Meanwhile, he pitches Radha on producing a Harriett Tubman musical. 

It's punchlines like this that find Radha having to hold back her frustrations for Archie. The audience is given insight, realizing the fear of an artist who can't get financed. For Radha, this may as well be her last opportunity, making her In the Heights-esque musical an overnight success by any way necessary. Slowly, the vision changes. From amid the black-and-white photography, she presents the show in color, slowly becoming more comical and unreal as it stops becoming her vision. Blank asks: what is the value in a vision? Should she sacrifice her own identity to get a paycheck? Even Archie isn't above sacrificing his queer Asian perspective for a fancy dinner and rent money. It sounds so luxurious to him, and it's the fight of the artist that will never go away. In fact, it may get worse by the time that Blank makes The 50-Year-Old Version.

Instead of reveling in just the ideas, Blank does an incredible job of exploring these marginalized voices. It isn't just hers. She allows her students to do slam poetry in static shots, allowing rap battles among older women to play out, making you understand the vitality. She asks the question "What story is important?" by allowing those around her, who exist without major funding to get a say. The audience is encouraged to be compelled by their contribution, making you understand that Radha isn't a token miscast, but one of the hundreds who keep fighting for their passion. Even by the end, she may not get what she wants, but one has to ask if this was worth the whole journey. The audience sees what is distinctly her voice, and it's jubilant. When it becomes compromised, things become clearer.

In 2020, in a time where more women are getting their voices out there, Blank is still an outlier. That may explain why, even inadvertently, her film recalls an equally overlooked demographic in the Black lesbian market in The Watermelon Woman. Her aesthetic creates a collage of moments, bringing the personal into an accessible form, allowing the internal to have vivid life. Everything about the execution of this story may seem tired, but Blank has too much to say to make that true. If anything, it's necessary to show how much time she is making up for. 40-year-olds (regardless of other context) are deserving of their voices to be heard, their art to be consumed and enjoyed. Blank does so in such a way that makes you feel like she's got a great, long road ahead of her.

The 40-Year-Old Version is a triumph for 2020, finding another voice emerging that will hopefully continue to provoke with complex stories that are rich with humor, but more importantly, a vitality that is often overlooked. It's a call to stop compromising vision so that these stories can ring true, allowing everything to be told honestly and, more importantly, entertainingly. Once an artist is allowed to express themselves, the organic experience can be fully appreciated. That is what lies in the small greivances that lead the audience to the finale. It's what makes Blank such a compelling new filmmaker. Here's hoping that she sticks around for more.