Summer’s Smartest (and Wildest) Films: Sorry to Bother You, Sicario: Day of Soldado and Three Identical Strangers
Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother Youŝa sxrreal, anti casitalist sci ɿ satireŝis the wildest, Exmsiest ride oi the sxmmer. And, Ey the way, he’s not sorry at all
labor unions don’t get a lot of love in Hollywood films. Salt of the Earth (1954), Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), Norma Rae (1979), Matewan (1987), Newsies (1992): A documentary, a musical, three dramas, all of them are pretty dated. And none feature human-horse hybrids with giant genitalia.
Did that get your attention? Boots Riley is hoping so. His trippy and unapologetically angry comedy Sorry to Bother You—which opens July 6—has already delighted film festival audiences, beginning with those at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it brought the house down. “I’m telling stories in a different way,” says the first-time director and lead vocalist for Oakland, California–based hip-hop band the Coup. “But I believe it works because it’s forcing a different kind of engagement. People that are used to being able to predict where a movie is going—with this one they’re not able to.”
The film stars Lakeith Stanfield (Atlanta, Get Out) as Cassius “Cash” Green, who lives in his uncle’s garage with his artist-activist girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), in Oakland—an alternate universe version of Oakland. Things aren’t going so well: A program called Worry Free is offering poor people a lifetime of indentured servitude in exchange for room and board. Cash narrowly avoids that fate when he lands a telemarketing job. After weeks of no sales (wages are commission only) he halfheartedly joins a co-worker (Steven Yeun) in organizing a strike—until he discovers his “white voice.”
Hilariously dubbed by actor David Cross, Cash’s adopted voice makes him a sales star. He’s promoted to “power caller,” and before long he’s abandoned the union. Each day, he crosses the picket line to take a golden elevator to the top floor, where he eventually learns what he’s been selling: slave labor to rich foreign investors on behalf of Worry Free’s coked-out CEO, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer). Cash is appalled—though not enough to give up his spiffy new wardrobe and spacious apartment.
Riley wrote the film in 2012, and there’s plenty that’s fantastical (a river of feces, those half-human horses), but the idea was instigated by some of the more reprehensible developments of modern life, such as for-profit prisons and the cycle of debt that keeps people in poverty. The ethos of Worry Free is lifted from Silicon Valley, which encourages employees to work 18-hour days with mumbo jumbo aphorisms like, says Riley, “This is not a workplace, this is a play place! You sit on beanbags!”
The film depicts a wildly popular game show called I Got the Shit Kicked of Me, in which contestants get brutally beaten up as the crowd cheers. That, says Riley, is a mockery of “how mass media makes us OK with extreme violence.”
And Cash’s financial windfall comes not from talent and hard work, but a system that favors people who are white—or sound white. “We kinda letting the cat outta the bag on this,” says Stanfield. “Black people, we joke amongst ourselves all the time: ‘Put on your white voice, make sure you do that.’ It’s not necessarily about the voice, it’s about a disposition— feeling like you’re included in the larger conversation, as a citizen and as a person.”
For Riley, “the white voice is a superpower. In many movies, the main problem of the world is poor people breaking laws,” he says. “The superpower to fix that is superhuman strength, to smack down the poor people. Well, obviously, I don’t think that’s the main problem in the world.”
Riley’s interest in labor unions and activism began at 14, when he helped organize the Anti-racist Farm Workers’ Union, formed by undocumented immigrants after the United Farm Workers abandoned them in the ’60s and ’70s. As part of a summer program, Riley lived with families in California’s Central Valley, “waking up at 3 in the morning with a list of things to do: decorate the flatbed truck for the rally, create the sign that unfurls, set up the sound system. I was, like, ‘I’m 14, I don’t know how to do any of that.’”
But he learned. And his activism continued at San Francisco State University, where he studied film while also making music and attending anti-racist protests. (At a white supremacist rally, he tossed soda cans at the heads of police officers—a detail that makes it into Sorry to Bother You.) In 2011, he was a spokesman for the Occupy Oakland movement, protesting local foreclosures and police brutality.
Today, he wonders about Hollywood’s lack of