Review of Sorry to Bother You (2018) by Matt G — 26 Jul 2018

With Sorry to Bother You, Director Boots Riley has emerged onto the cinematic landscape like an unexpected houseguest busting down the party doors. As you can expect from any freshman effort, it's ladled with style, some of which comes off as more immature and insecure than fully realized. Mostly though, this is an unpredictable and wonderfully insane burst of colorful creativity that I can guarantee will be unlike anything else you'll see all year.

Set in either an alternative universe or a near-future, Cassius Green finds himself in a whirlwind of macabre success and personal compromise when his "white voice" propels him to the heights of the telemarketing game. The cast is jam-packed with talent. Stanfield is immediately empathetic, Thompson exudes strength, while Cross and Oswalt embrace their voice-roles with hilariously exaggerated genius.

The sales scenes are uniquely kinetic, with Cassius shown literally dropping into the customers home, representing the all-too familiar privacy invasion of unsolicited calls. It's a daring choice in a movie full of daring choices. Most of those choices work, and even those that don't are easily forgiven for their unabashed, fence-swinging nobility and their Atlanta-esque humor-mix of parody and dryness.

Best of all, Sorry to Bother You uses all this to present a thinly-veiled vision of what being a person-of-color goes through in America. To survive, many minorities are forced to compromise their integrity, lose their cultural truth, and suffer a molecular altering of personal character; "If you see a problem you can't fix then you decide to just get used to it." This is a bright and bold alarm clock movie, that uses wild entertainment in hopes of waking us all up.