by Chris Feil
If you think that the summer movie season is winding down into boredom, Boots Riley has a debut feature to knock you off your ass. Sorry to Bother You, his Sundance breakout, is audacious filmmaking of the rarest order. Already tailor made to stir the midnight movie circuit back to life, the film is a sledgehammer to convention, taste, and politeness to make the likes of John Waters and even Jodorowsky proud.
With such wild territory, part of the thrill of the film is taking its bumps as its concept goes ever so slightly off the rails. But with this first film, Riley has delivered something delightfully convincing with complete confidence even when the film strays into the deeply strange...
Lakeith Stanfield stars as Cassius “Cash” Green, an introverted guy who has taken a new position as an entry level telemarketer for the grungy corporation Regalview. His struggles to land sale and the resulting commissions find an instant turnaround when he adopts a white voice to handle his clients and management. Meanwhile his artist girlfriend Detroit (the ever slyly genius Tessa Thompson) and his fellow coworkers begin a revolt to unionize against the company. But Cash’s facade is just the first compromise into increasingly immoral layers of assimilation, as he quickly moves up the Regalview’s ranks and attracts the attention of the head of an evil, enslaving corporation, Armie Hammer’s sleazeball Steve Lift.
Sorry to Bother You is both incredibly silly and scathingly wise, at time pushing its satire to outright science fiction. At the heart of its treatise on racial and economic inequity in America is a rage for both the evil, exploitive corporate apparatus and the farce of contemporary consumption of information. Riley is at his most gutsy when examining the embedded racism of proprietary systems and how they turn abuse and suffering into consumable content. Systemic social bankruptcy is its primary target and the film posits authenticity as the primary method to combat it.
The film deserves to be admired for the wide reach of its insights, even if it sometimes sacrifices cohesion for the sake of fitting it all in its zippy package. It is playful when it bites, with whimsically fascinating costuming and an electro-drab visual identity all its own. But major laughs come from how the film relishes its own brand of oddness, and Riley’s assured comedic maneuvering keeps the film’s sequences from delving into sketch territory. Sorry to Bother You’s highs are quite thrillingly unlike anything else in theatres this year.
And still its heart is humane when examining Cash’s inner conflict with submission and the stakes behind his struggle. Riley is partly blessed to have such an impressive ensemble to add dimension to some of the thinner characterizations his script sometimes provides. Stanfield is a compelling everyman but approaches the film’s turns with specifity for a performance of complex physicality. Thompson relishes the sexually empowered and straight-shooting Detroit, a woman we’d desperately love to see outside of the film’s predominantly male perspective. And Hammer, snorting lines of cocaine the length of a city block, gets to indulge his wacko all-in character actor instincts that his leading man roles rarely afford.
Its high-concept satire may not land every bizarre flourish it skyrockets at us, but Sorry to Bother You’s wit is both profound and satisfyingly off-the-wall. As the world continues to reveal the depths of its evils, Boots Riley has arrived to break some rules and find inventive ways to stir up some hearty laughs. It’s engineered to incite strong reactions and befuddlement, but it is an unmissable piece of provocative entertainment.
Grade: B