Directed by: Boots Riley
Starring: Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Steven Yeun, Armie Hammer
Rated R, 111 minutes
Gone are the days when the dull insanity of office life could be illustrated with a man in a basement mumbling about his red stapler. Two decades after “Office Space” showed us that corporate life etherizes the human spirit, “Sorry to Bother You” is here to pump adrenaline back into our sluggish veins, to remind us that we could have it so much better. That it comes with this effacing title is part misdirection, part kiss-off; this is the last apology you’ll hear before writer-director Boots Riley tears down the walls.
Riley, known better as a rapper and activist (this is his first feature film), starts early. In an opening scene, our hero, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield, “Get Out”), and his girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson, “Annihilation”), are interrupted in the middle of an intimate moment when one of their bedroom walls flips open; that’s how we learn they live in a garage. The movie plays it off as a fact of life for poor people—you live in your uncle’s garage, your door is broken, so it goes—but it’s a surprise that foreshadows the movie’s flamboyant style, its alternative American universe.
Things kick off when Cassius, desperate for money, finds work in a telemarketing office. Another employee, Squeeze (Steven Yeun, “The Walking Dead”), is trying to start a union, and gets Cassius on board. But Cassius excels at the job, and right when the union is gaining steam, he gets a hefty promotion and leaves his buddies behind for the top floor.
Enter Worryfree, a massive, Amazon-like corporation whose CEO, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer, “Call Me By Your Name”), offers lifetime work contracts and houses employees in dormitories next to the factories where they work. Accused of exploitation and called a slaver, Lift makes his way into Cassius’ life when he hears about Cassius’ stellar sales record. Cornering Cassius at a party, Lift offers him a fabulous new job, one that will secure him a life of luxury.
It also comes at the expense of Cassius’ dignity. At the same party, Lift snorts mile-long lines of coke and playfully waves his gun at Cassius; he leads a crowd of sycophants in a chant of “Rap! Rap! Rap!” at Cassius, the only black man in the room. Praised as a sales wunderkind, Cassius is Lift’s plaything, pressured to entertain, intimidated into keeping the smile plastered on his face. He can’t even speak as himself; confined to his “white voice” (dubbed over by another actor entirely), Cassius is forced into a horrifying mold.
But the pay is good, and it’s hard to leave that behind. If money were easy to turn down, “Sorry to Bother You” wouldn’t exist. Riley acknowledges that dignity and fair working conditions are worth fighting for, but he also acknowledges that if you can’t afford a working car or an actual home or basic healthcare, you’re almost always going to put the battle off until later. Here, though, Cassius’ failure to fight the good fight has disastrous effects, not just with his relationships with his friends and with Detroit, but more literally, too. When violent protests break out over Squeeze’s union, Cassius gets pelted in the head with a soda can; his wound bleeds for days.
Then things really take a turn for the surreal. The hottest show in America, viewed by 150 million people nightly, involves real people getting beaten senseless on live TV; Cassius appears on the show to expose Lift’s treachery, but first he has to take his beating while two white men hold him down. Meanwhile, Detroit stages a performative art exhibit, wherein she recites movie dialogue while the audience hurls bullet casings and balloons full of sheep’s blood at her.
The movie’s foundation is this blistering, anything-goes creativity, but upon that foundation Riley builds something layered and extraordinary. It’s an outlandish comedy, but it features the most honest performances I’ve seen all year; it’s plot-heavy, but each scene is crafted with poetic imagery; it’s inseparable from the context of race, but it’s less about that and more about calling out an economic system that works against everyone. More than anything else, though, “Sorry to Bother You” feels like an accurate depiction of American life in 2018, a mirror held up unapologetically, revealing that the funhouse distortion isn’t the mirror’s fault.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 8/10/18.