Review: Sorry To Bother You

I’m sitting in the theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and it’s 10:00am, which seems curiously early for a screening. A very small congregation of critics has shown up to bear witness to Boots Riley’s directorial debut, Sorry To Bother You. Most of these critics are white — maybe that’s not a coffee-spitting shock, but it’s New York City, it’s Brooklyn, it’s an important release for a film, and this theater is less than ¼ full. This morning, I purchased a four dollar piece of toast at Whole Foods around the corner, and a decent cup of coffee which invariably cost even more. White cyclists amass at the David Byrne bike racks outside, perhaps commuting to their startup jobs from their startup apartments.

And then there’s me. Sitting in that wonderful curl of audience seating at BAM. I’ve already seen Sorry To Bother You, and I’ve already loved it. At least, I think I loved it. Snuggled in a packed premiere at SXSW, seated next to a Rotten Tomatoes executive and woefully undernourished, still rankled by a kind of red carpet snafu fifteen minutes earlier, I was out of sorts. The film followed through with that, leaving me further scattered. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, or didn’t wonder at how continuously daring, suffocating, penetrative, and hilarious it was, but because I didn’t know if I’d seen anything like it.

It’s not the type of comedy we’re used to encountering outside of a fiercely independent renegade project. Sorry To Bother You is less hiply postured than Dope, less puerile than a typical popcorn comedy, and more cunningly amusing than Get Out. It’s a different beast.

That last film…sigh. I don’t want to bring Sorry To Bother You to some estimable battleground with Jordan Peele’s black comedic (times two) horror masterpiece, but that isn’t stopping the mob of critics who have all shoved each other out of the way to be first in line, clutching patronizing flowers to order Riley’s surreal film as this year’s oh-god-I-can’t-even-say-it. Why do we do this, pit these movies against each other, especially Black movies? It feeds into the pervading myth that work by marginalized creators is constantly jockeying for precious space in the same meager reserved marquee, that the dull-lit exhibit must be filled, and only by one example, thank you. The shitty thing is, it sometimes feels like that’s true, but critics don’t have to help uphold that dysfunctional standard, either.

I am also wary of the word “surreal,” and especially wary of the phrase “magical realism,” yet it’s hard not to want to apply these flags to Sorry To Bother You. It’s also been branded as somewhat of a sci-fi film, which is not untoward, and also as a comedy, which is clearly the intent of the satirical and farcical weaponry its using, but not its end-goal, either.

I’ll give you an example of the richness inherent in the work. There’s a very early scene where we find Cassius Green (a/k/a “Cash” a/k/a the adventurous, beguiling actor Lakeith Stanfield) positioned in the cubicle of his new job. He stares slightly off-center to the camera, while behind him two white men perform a full-on slapstick routine on a photocopier. They’re in soft-focus, and as the scene progresses and goes to Lakeith each time, their display grows increasingly hilarious, until a maelstrom of copy paper is spewing willy-nilly, slapping the glass enclosure in waves, unbeknownst to Cash, who is pretending to be intently involved in a conversation. It’s an early directed laugh in the movie, and both times I saw it it got a tremendous responses from the audience. It’s a very visual routine, breezily humorous. Easy.

But that routine is also tremendously sad. The character of Cash is not an ambitious creative we’re meant to root for or some proudly heroic savant. He’s a down-on-his-luck lifer, living in poverty (an aspect strangely softened by its own absurdity, as he lives in his uncle’s house, tucked away in a garage-cum-bedroom with a broken door), and all he wants is to make a decent living. The stumbling, theatrically synthetic, and morally bankrupt stooges who run his office floor gleefully profit off of the work of their shackled telemarketers, and none of them know shit from good chocolate. The enfeebled decision-makers making those copies don’t know shit either. And Cash doesn’t know that they don’t know shit, or otherwise doesn’t care. Brother just wants to get paid.

He’s pretty good at it, turns out. Opportunities fractalize quickly, and Cash excels among his friends, who politely support him but palpably experience his changes. The consequences of his growth provide early plot fuel, but it’s easier to empathize with his social circle’s hesitation than his soaring rise through the ranks of Regal View Telemarketing.

Alternately Kafkaesque and Kaufmanesque, Cash is simplistic. Gone is the poetically pragmatic soul of Stanfield’s Darius in Atlanta, or the modest and beset humanitarian Colin in Crown Heights. He’s just a dude trying to make a few bucks. He lied to get this job, and might fuck over friend and consumer to keep it. Is he a villain? Homie lives in a damn garage — would you blame him?

Now really, I don’t think Cash is a villain, but one of the most interesting components in Sorry To Bother You is whether the film does, or doesn’t, and how it goes about testing his basic humanity. A lot of those tests and questions are inconvenient, immodest, even sadistic in a spiritual way, with the character’s primary exceptionalism being his ability to employ his “white voice” to thrive as a telemarketer. I won’t provide any more secrets about what this exactly means but it’s worthy of a book in and of itself, and the film tumbles and stretches this magical inclusion, and others, to phenomenally weird and wonderful ends.

It’s unfair that I’m relegating Tessa Thompson — let alone ignoring the other co-stars, including one of my favorite appearances by Stephen Yeun of late — to a single paragraph, because her character Detroit will go down as one of the most important performances of her early career. Effortlessly proud, completely in love, piercingly intelligent, proactively defiant, weightless in her unerring style, the list goes on. She’s an iconoclastic presence on the screen that almost makes you want to shield your eyes, and vulnerable, and hilarious and complicated. Neither here nor there, she also gets one of the best lines in the film: “My parents wanted me to have an American name.”

Sorry To Bother You is a film about work, and selfishness, and selflessness. It’s an entertaining but deeply rebellious art piece that feels scientifically engineered to make white critics chuckle while they check for who’s in earshot. It’s metaphorical, allegorical. It’s an oracle to our era, though a viciously cruel one at times. If it is surreal, it’s later-stage Buñuel surreal, an avant-garde danse macabre interrupted, gratefully, by a sense of hope.

About the Author

Leonardo Faierman was born in Buenos Aires, raised in Queens, on the playground was where he planned most of his schemes. Since then he’s plowed a jagged path as a writer, editor, podcaster, comic creator, and mostly benevolent malcontent in New York City. Leo’s 1/5th of the long-running podcast @BlackComicsChat, 1/2 of horror podcast @TheScreamSquad, staff writer for Screen Rant, film editor for the independent sci-fi monthly newsletter Narazu, and generally has words all over the interwebs, but they’re frequently gathered up on Twitter at @LeonardoEff.