The Plagiarists

A young, urban white couple from the "creative class" — a filmmaker who sidelines (or mainlines) as a director of commercials (Eamon Monaghan) and a writer who insists that she is working on an autobiographical novel (Lucy Kaminsky) — find themselves stranded with car trouble while on their way back home from a cottage weekend. They are rescued by the winsome and welcoming Clip (Michael "Clip" Payne, of Parliament-Funkadelic fame), an older Black man who houses, entertains, and all but bewitches the pair with his eloquent recounting of tales of his youth. Their creative juices reinvigorated by this chance encounter, the couple has the rug pulled out from under them months later when they realize that they have been the "victims" of an ambiguous, seemingly unmotivated case of cultural appropriation, which brings in its wake those delightful existential questions of "authenticity."