Indie Rom-Coms Finally Show Black Girls Some Love

By centering a black woman’s experience, Netflix’s new film The Incredible Jessica Jamesis the indie rom-com black fans of the genre have been waiting for.

There is a genre of indie, slightly navel-gazey movie that is tailor-made for rainy and/or sick days. They usually revolve around someone in their twenties or thirties, living in a big city, and struggling through a crisis in love, career, or family. There are growing pains, much awkwardness, some sex, and perhaps a public dance scene, as well as a (or several) moment(s) of realization. By the end of the movie, the lead character’s path might still be a little cloudy, but crucially, there is light at the end of the tunnel. In case it wasn’t clear, the lead character in this movie is always white.

Knowing all that, then, it is not that difficult to chart the lineage of the new Jim Strouse film, The Incredible Jessica James, starring one half of WNYC podcast 2 Dope Queens — and The Daily Show alum — Jessica Williams. Netflix’s recent acquisition has all the trappings of its indie status: from its memorably hyperbolic and eponymous title to its subject matter — the life, loves, and times of a girl in the big city. Fifteen seconds into the opening scene, some of which appears in the official trailer, you are comfortably up to speed on just what the dialogue in this film will sound like. We have seen it a lot over the years in similarly titled movies: Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall is a grandmother of sorts to Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha, and not just because both those eponymous movies were directed by men (Gerwig cowrote Frances Ha). Recognizing this genre for what it is does not make the films inherently bad. The Incredible Jessica James is in (often) good company. It is also, in 2017, one of the first, if not the first, time one of these films has had a black woman at its center.

There is no particular pleasure in noting that Jessica James stands apart by virtue of her race — not least because this is not a film about her blackness. Her race is not at the center of the movie. Indeed, it is never explicitly referred to at any point. But the story is structured around this tall and interesting black woman, and that’s something that is rare and wonderful. The big screen seems to finally be catching up on what web series — and lately TV shows — have been quietly and tenaciously carving out over the last half decade or so: narratives that center black experiences while also choosing to not focus explicitly on, for example, social justice and civil rights.

Web series like Rachel Holder’s (now recast and retitled) I Love Bekka & Lucy, Sam Bailey’s You’re So Talented, and the many shows of Numa Perrier and Dennis Dortch and Black&Sexy TV, were part of a modern wave primarily interested in the inner lives of young black people. When we think millennials, we are almost never picturing a black guy who makes custom T-shirts, or a young black woman working for a nonprofit — and so these series served to remind us that we could, and should, be. Those creators — themselves often black women and men — were telling very specific stories that hadn’t been told before on the platforms suddenly made …

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