As monotonous and familiar as the movie scene has gotten of late, films can still surprise you. There are films that are shocking because they’re so good; there are films that are stunning because they’re so misbegotten and awful. There are great moments inside mediocre movies, and there are long stretches of ineptitude tucked into otherwise accomplished movies. But perhaps the most surprising — and definitely the most gratifying — films are the ones that essentially shouldn’t even exist in the first place; films that are so strange, so distinct from everything else happening in the zeitgeist, so completely out of left field in terms of what movies are supposed to be at that moment in time that you end up boggling at how it even got made, let alone how it ended up so fulfilling and wonderful.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie like that, because despite the proliferation of media spurred by companies like Netflix, the motion picture industry is still pretty conservative and risk-averse thanks to the sunk costs of the kind of tentpole blockbusters that have to pay off in order to finance everything else. But Sorry to Bother You is an entirely amazing movie, despite being made up of elements so at odds with what audiences are conditioned to expect that it sometimes looks and feels like something that dropped in from a different planet. It’s so original and daring that merely describing it accurately — it’s a black comedy, in the figurative and literal senses of the word, whirled together with a potent romance, a razor-keen satire, and the most brutal attack on American post-industrial capitalism of the last decade at least, directed by an unapologetically Marxist rapper — makes you sound like some kind of a lunatic. Its mere existence is something of a miracle, and the fact that it actually lives up to its promise and its premise is nothing short of astounding.
Sorry to Bother You concerns itself with Cash Green, a struggling working-class black man in a slightly distorted but instantly recognizable version of Oakland, California. While the neighborhood gentrifies all around him and he struggles just to pay the rent on the shabby garage rented to him by his uncle, his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) makes her own compromises to sell her art. Cash can barely manage the bare minimum of work required to fulfill his duties at the low-rent telemarketing company he works for, until a veteran of the job (a fiendishly good Danny Glover) clues him in to the big secret to success: using a ‘white voice’, a confident and breezy tone that reassures other wealthy Caucasians that you are a person to be trusted. As his mastery of the technique vaults Cash higher and higher in the company ranks, the colleagues he left behind, still scrabbling for subsistence wages, begin organizing a strike against the very bosses who have transformed him from a failure into a superstar. It takes a lot of twists and turns from there, the exact nature of which it would be a crime to spoil, but that’s about the size of it.
None of this might seem remarkable, or even all that odd; corporate satires are a dime a dozen, even if really good ones are bought with far rarer coins, and every crummy TV show that’s ever aired has mined some pathos out of the idea of someone making it big and having to deal with whether financial success turns them into a sellout who forgot where they came from. But the devil is in the details in Riley’s powerful vision of a place where no one ever forgets where they came from, no matter how hard they try. It’s the effortless way Sorry to Bother You skates between ever expression of its ethos: musical, comedy, romance, surrealist nightmare, social satire, hood movie, racial polemic, even socialist-realist into magical-realist, that holds it altogether and makes it such a singular piece of art. Certainly it has precedents — dozens of them, dating back to the ’30s, none of which Riley is shy about acknowledging — but its successful integration of something that, while it dates back to the early days of the Obama administration, could not be a more timely expression of the way we work today, is what elevates it from a joke movie that works to a satirical masterpiece. (Those precedents are many and varied, but what it reminded me of more than anything was B. Traven’s brilliant masterwork, The Death Ship, which also captured both pitch-black satire and numbing realism, often in the same passage.)
Another very particular anomaly about Sorry to Bother You is the fact that it even managed to get done. Riley made compromises along the way, as anyone swimming in the soup of late capitalism must do; but he remained always committed to the specific meaning of his story and the specific targets of its wrath. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he managed — with at least a little monetary help from Amazon, a company that it aims its guns at with clarity and accuracy — to get into wide release, in 2018 America, a movie about labor organizing. Many reviews have noted the similarity between Riley’s film and Get Out, but he seems to be dead set on avoiding what happened to the Jordan Peele joint. He has so far thwarted with extreme prejudice every attempt by the white liberal establishment to co-opt or claim credit for Sorry to Bother You’s message, demanding in interviews to be identified as a communist and keeping the focus squarely on its economic and racial realities and not on partisan bromides that serve only to comfort the ruling classes.
Sorry to Bother You has myriad other great qualities. The acting, from an entirely non-white cast (with the exception of Armie Hammer, who throws himself fully into the role of the heel), is spectacular, especially the delightfully nasty Glover, the electrifying Thompson, the increasingly reliable Steven Yeun, and especially Lakeith Stanfield, who may be the most capable African-American actor in the country today. It’s a good-looking film, almost entirely free of the lack of assurance often displayed by first-time feature filmmakers. Its script is remarkably tight, and where it becomes loose and chaotic, it’s entirely in service of the story. Quibbling about minor issues is an insult to what is simply one of the best movies of the decade, and more importantly, a crucial reminder that in the hands of brave and determined artists, cinema is still an explosively powerful political tool.