The American Tragedy and the Pen of Russell Banks

Denis Mueller is a documentary filmmaker; it’s his artistic raison d’etre. The topics of his many films are political, literary or both. They include Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train, The FBI’s War on Black America, Peace Has No Borders (co-produced with Deb Ellis), and Nelson Algren: The End is Nothing, the Road is All (with Ilko Davidov). His newest film, due out in spring 2026, is titled Russell Banks: I Write in Order to Be a Better Person. A thoughtful, literary look at the works and life of one of the best US storytellers in the last fifty years, Mueller’s film incorporates home movies of Banks’ family, interviews with novelists, filmmakers, family members and an ongoing conversation with Banks himself. The viewer is invited into the wintry woods of Banks beginnings in New England, travels south to Florida and the Caribbean and ends with Banks in the mountains if Peru. Along the journey, one hears the tale of an everyman whose father was a plumber trapped in his job; a father who left his family when Russell was barely pubescent, leaving emotional scars that would define the direction and themes of much of Banks’ fiction.

I was introduced to Russel Banks’ work through his novel Continental Drift not long after it was published in 1981. I remember thinking that it captured to dismal spirit of the time—Ronald Reagan as president, labor unions under attack, white supremacy climbing back from its temporary retreat after the attacks on it in the 1960s and 1970s, and the renewed certitude of the moneychangers and their fooled victims. However, if I were to choose just one novel of Banks to take with me, it would be his opus Cloudsplitter. This labyrinthine tale of the freedom fighter and abolitionist warrior John Brown is told through the eyes of his son Owen, the only survivor of Brown’s guerrilla campaign against the evil of American slavery as practiced in the United States. It’s a story that puts the sin of the African diaspora and the enslavement, breeding and trading in human lives at the center while also being a story that situates the resistance to that sin in an equal place, despite the reality that the sin itself remains an open sore on the US body politic. Although the bulk of the film’s conversations were recorded in and around the time of Trump’s first four years in the White House, his reappearance there in a considerably more malignant form underlines the words on white supremacy that weave in and out of Mueller and Ilko’s work.

Banks describes the centrality of the enslavement, trading in and breeding of human beings as the one narrative everyone in the US participates in. It determines US politics, culture, education and who we live next door to. His awakening to and development of this understanding came about while he was a student at the University of North Carolina in the 1960s. The film shows footage of civil rights protests and antiwar protests while Banks tells the viewers how his participation in these movements defined his lifetime politics. The archival footage onscreen purposefully places Banks’ words inside the greater context of history while also describing his own personal journey. This interweaving is consistent through the film, encouraging the viewer to consider the similarities and differences between Banks development as a politically conscious individual and their own. The filmmakers’ superb editing is what makes this work so well.

Another element of Banks’ fiction which becomes clear in the film’s consideration of Banks’ novel Affliction, is that Banks’ novels are emotionally complex stories about the complexity of humans and their relationships, especially of humans in the capitalist dream/ nightmare we call the USA. This emotional truth begins at childhood, Banks tells the viewer while remembering his own childhood. There’s a moment in the film when Banks tells us that he doesn’t want readers to seek identification with his characters; instead, he looks for empathy. “That way,” he states. “I’m freed up to write about people that aren’t easily identifiable with, like, you know, social outcasts.” Elsewhere in the film, Banks begins to talk about the US population—African-American, Asian-American, Italian-American, etc. Calling this phenomenon the hyphenated resident, he asks, “We know what the first part means more or less, but what does the American part mean?” That’s an important question; one that the current regime of repression and detention of immigrants makes even more apposite.

I’ve been aware of this film since Mueller began it several years ago. A mutual friend of ours, Robert Niemi, worked with Mueller during the series of interviews from which Banks’ discussions in the film are excerpted. Niemi taught Banks’ novels in his Working-Class Fiction classes at St. Michael’s College in Vermont and was the author of a 1997 book on Banks’ work as part of Twaynes United States Authors Series. Once the two men discovered their affinity for Banks (which came about during conversations about Mueller’s film on Nelson Algren), the course was set, so to speak. Unfortunately, both Niemi and Banks died from various cancers before Mueller and Ilko’s work was completed. I’m being honest as a mirror when I write that it is well worth the wait. To write not for fame or spite, but to become a better person, is a worthy aspiration for a writer. This film does an excellent job of describing Russel Banks’ pursuit and ultimate fulfillment of that.

I Write to Be a Better Person will be screened at the 2026 American Documentary and Animation Film Festival in Palm Springs, CA. March 25-29, 2026

https://www.amdocfilmfest.com/

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