These little set pieces crackle with DIY wit as they paint a searingly silly vision of living paycheck to paycheck in America. Riley turns the dull art of cold-calling into a literal intrusion, visualizing Cash’s desk smashing through the ceilings of his customers, and turning his phone conversations into face-to-face confrontations. The film’s first big metatextual gag is the “white voice” that Cash adopts to rise through the ranks at his job when he speaks on the phone to customers, the comedian David Cross’s voice comes out of his mouth, in a perverse, particularly surreal illustration of code-switching. Cash and his girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), an activist-artist, cling to their independence but struggle to stay afloat, so Cash gets a job at a telemarketing firm called RegalView to try and make ends meet. Employees of Worry Free dress in jumpsuits, get free room and board (in shoebox apartments), and spend their whole lives doing menial work. Our hero, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), or “Cash,” lives in his uncle’s garage in Oakland and is struggling to find a foothold in a society dominated by a conglomerate called Worry Free Living. When Sorry to Bother You flops, it does so in mesmerizing fashion. Riley is trying to confront the very ways we communicate with each other, the sometimes-blurry boundaries between race and class, and the increasingly overt malevolence of free-market capitalism-all within the confines of a raucous comedy. But oddly that excess helps it feel all the more suited to the charged landscape of 2018, one where politics courses through so much of daily life. The film perhaps tries to tackle too much in its 105-minute running time. The movie is at times a mess, but a compelling one, and this debut from Boots Riley should herald a fascinating filmmaking career.Īs a member of the rap group the Coup, Riley has long made challenging political music, and Sorry to Bother You is a similarly confrontational work that rushes at every topical issue it can think of. The story’s heightened reality works best when it’s barely distinguishable from our own-though it starts to lose steam the more it drifts into fantasy. Sorry to Bother You mostly seems to understand this: The film is a funny, harsh satire of race relations, the gig economy, and gentrification set in an America in which the volume is turned up to 11. Sometimes, the smartest dystopian fiction knows that you need to give the real world just a little tweak to make it scary.
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