Boots Riley (2018)

At the start of Boots Riley’s debut feature, his protagonist Cassius ‘Cash’ Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is out of work.  Cash and his artist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) live together in Oakland, California.  Their home is Cash’s uncle (Terry Crews)’s garage and they’re struggling to pay the rent even on that.  Cash goes for a telemarketing job with a local outfit called RegalView.  The interviewer (Robert Longstreet) realises Cash has invented stuff on his CV but this works to his advantage.  According to the interviewer, the job has only two requirements – initiative and being able to read:  Cash’s untruths are proof he satisfies the first of these.  When he starts work, complying with the company’s ‘Stick to the Script’ motto doesn’t do Cash much good.  He struggles to make sales until an experienced telemarketer (Danny Glover) recommends a new technique – ‘Use your white voice’.  Cash does so and the effect on his hit rate is remarkable.  There’s talk of his promotion to the ‘Power Caller’ elite within RegalView.  He assumes he’s blown his chance of that when he joins a union set up by co-worker Squeeze (Stephen Heun) and takes part in a workplace protest.  To Cash’s surprise, he’s promptly and doubly elevated – promoted and initiated into the mysteries of the exclusive Power Caller suite on an upper floor of the firm’s offices.  As a senior colleague (Kate Berlant) amusingly demonstrates, even getting into the suite requires keying in of a very, very long security code.

Cash discovers that RegalView is hooked up to a company called WorryFree, which offers free food and lodging to employees in exchange for a lifetime work contract.  In the alternative universe of Sorry to Bother You, the practice isn’t deemed illegal but is politically controversial.  Its vigorous opponents include a radical group called The Left Eye, of which Detroit is an active member.   Cash becomes uneasy about his new job but it pays too well for him to resist and he gives up on union activities instead.  (The African-American pronunciation of ‘Cassius’ makes the hero’s abbreviated name very naturally fitting.)  He moves out of the garage and into a swish apartment though his relationship with Detroit suffers.  His professional advancement is confirmed with an invitation to a party hosted by WorryFree’s CEO Steve Lift (Armie Hammer).  During a one-on-one interview with Lift, Cash urgently needs the bathroom.  Lift directs him to a room with a (jade) green door.  Inside, Cash discovers a monstrous, shackled creature – half-human, half-horse – that begs him for help.  He returns terrified to Lift who calmly explains first that Cash opened an (olive) green door by mistake, then that WorryFree is implementing a strategy to make their workforce stronger and more obedient by transforming them into ‘equisapiens’.  The transformation is simply achieved:  workers have only to snort a potent genetically-modifying powder thinking it’s cocaine.  Cash is even more terrified now, having accepted the CEO’s earlier offer of coke.  Although Lift assures him that he’s ingested normal cocaine, he offers Cash a five-year contract to become an equisapien and live among others of his kind, posing as their revolutionary leader but actually working to ensure the achievement of WorryFree’s business goals.  At the end of the contract, for which Cash will be paid $100m, he can take medication to reverse the genetic changes.

The anti-capitalist satire of Sorry to Bother You needn’t have an exclusively racial focus:  the low-paid workers turned into horses could presumably include white as well as non-white employees.  Yet Lift, when he offers Cash the contract, describes his intended role as the equisapiens’ Martin Luther King.  Besides, it’s hard not to associate this horror story, whose main characters and writer-director are black, with two exceptionally high-impact African-American films of the last year or so, Get Out and BlacKkKlansman.  Nefarious white use of medical science is central to Boots Riley’s movie as it was to Jordan Peele’s.  Riley’s plot, like Spike Lee’s, takes off from a young black man’s vocal impersonation of a white man.  The physical consequences of the genetic modification at work here are more graphically horrifying than the less visible ones in Get Out.  But even allowing that Spike Lee had an advantage in basing his film on real events, the racial vocals element of Sorry to Bother You is relatively weak – good for immediate laughs but not substantially followed through.  David Cross provides Lakeith Stanfield’s white voice; to show there’s one in every black person, Detroit tries hers out too – courtesy of Lily James.

This is symptomatic of Riley’s somewhat scattershot approach:  Sorry to Bother You has more targets but is less disciplined than Get Out.   I wasn’t clear, for example, whether or, if so, how Detroit’s radical performance art was meant to fit into the scheme of things.  The film is more effective in suggesting and skewering malignant synergies between corporate enterprise and internet publicity, between exploitation of labour, degradation of popular entertainment and an increasing appetite for public humiliation. When Cash crosses the union’s picket line and one of the picketers throws a canned drink at him, yelling ‘Have a cola and smile, bitch!’ and hitting him in the forehead, video of the incident becomes an internet meme.  In hurrying to escape from the room with the olive door, Cash drops his phone.  The imprisoned equisapiens use it to send a video message to Detroit’s number and Cash decides to broadcast the video to expose WorryFree.  To ensure maximum publicity, he unveils it on a reality TV show called ‘I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me!’ – where he’s first required to undergo the physically gross indignities that appearances on the show demand.  The equisapiens’ message duly goes viral but Cash’s plan completely backfires.   Steve Lift’s sensational strategy is hailed as audacious and innovative.  Stocks in WorryFree go through the roof.

Boots Riley, best known as a rapper and music producer, works up plenty of momentum and, by the closing stages, the film’s messiness is working in its favour:  you really don’t know what’s coming next.  It was late in the day that Jordan Peele opted to give Get Out a less bleak ending than the one it finally had.  For those who think Peele chickened out, Sorry to Bother You’s exuberant pessimism may be compensation.  Cash and Detroit reconcile and return to garage accommodation but in the last, startling moment before the closing credits, Cash sprouts an equine profile – Lift lied to him after all.  Midway through the credits, his metamorphosis is complete and he leads an equisapien mob to Lift’s home.  Calling on the intercom, he utters once more the telemarketer’s supposedly standard intro ‘Sorry to bother you’ (I wish they really were so reliably apologetic).  The horse people then break down the door.

There is one genuinely happy aspect to the film: a leading role for Lakeith Stanfield, who’s impressed me every time I’ve seen him in supporting parts (in Short Term 12, Selma, Straight Outta Compton, Miles Ahead and War Machine, as well as Get Out).  Those performances have made clear he’s a dramatic actor of great potential.  Here he proves his comic gifts too.  His loose-limbed yet shambling Cash is often very funny but Stanfield’s emotional power makes what happens to the young man really matter too.

11 December 2018