Creative Writing

If you’ve ever suffered through a college course in the title subject, this low-budget black-and-white drama will probably impress you with its verisimilitude. Seth McClellan—who directed his own script and stars as a beleaguered writing instructor at a community college—has got it just right: the lazy students with outsize ambitions, the
damaging critiques from clueless classmates, the teacherly advice to bad writers that, misunderstood, leads to even worse writing. The subplots delving into the students’ private lives are both overly familiar and underdeveloped, but a tense climax shows how easily the workshop format can degenerate into a venue for students’ prejudices and emotional hangups.