Sorry to Bother You

The directorial début of rapper, producer, and activist Boots Riley arrives with all the chaotic power that often characterize the first films of major new cinematic voices. Sorry to Bother You stars Lakeith Stanfield as Cassius "Cash" Green, a black everyman from Oakland, California, who takes a job as a low-level telemarketer to try and make ends meet. Success evades Cash until he gets advice from an older co-worker—Danny Glover in a small but pivotal role—to use his “white voice,” when selling over the phone. Within days, Cash becomes one of the most successful telemarketers in the company and gets invited to join the elite group of Power Sellers, which opens his eyes to levels of wealth and influence he may have suspected existed, but never quite believed before.

Riley overstuffs his picture with multiple themes, pointed commentaries, and percipient ideas about capitalism, race, power, self-determination, collectivism, identity, celebrity, social media, traditional media, and much more. He also utilizes a broad range of stylistic techniques that often prevents the narrative and its messages from landing within one coherent tone. The movie is part social satire; part absurdist comedy; part surrealist, alternative-reality sci-fi. Many of the shifts in tone and style yank the viewer out of the story rather than pulling us in. But these choices may not be the typical flaws of a first-time filmmaker so much as the deliberate decisions of an artistic provocateur, someone far more interested in getting ideas across than in crafting a perfect little narrative movie. Sorry to Bother You belongs in the tradition of Robert Downey’s Putney Swope (1969), Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin (1975), Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (2006), and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) and Chi-Raq (2015). 

The shrewd title suggests to the difficult job faced by both telemarketers and political filmmakers—getting audiences who may not be interested to listen to their message. Riley knows his points will go down better if he keeps surprising us and/or making us laugh, but to achieve this feat he pulls out so many of the stops that he fatigues the viewer before we’ve even reached the halfway point.  And in the second half, much of the sharp political subtext becomes less focused and often runs counter to how the characters have been established.

The humor is often laugh-out-loud funny, and the basic thesis about how the evils of capitalism are ignored in plain sight, resonates now more than ever.  But too much of Sorry to Bother You falls down in terms of the execution. One of Riley’s key stylistic choices is to create the “white voices” of his black characters by having well-know Caucasian comedians overdub the African American actors. The casting of instantly recognizable comic voices David Cross and Patton Oswalt to overdub Stanfield and Omari Hardwick (who plays Cash’s Power Seller supervisor) robs the actors of their ability to fully embody their characters. The awkwardness of this appropriation must be intentional, as Riley and his actors make no attempt at halfway decent lipsync, nor is this overdubbed dialogue mixed in such a way as to sound organic to the environments the characters are in. But whatever thematic points this technique achieves, it comes at the tremendous cost of negating the film’s already shaky internal verisimilitude. 

The overdubbing is introduced via a brilliantly written and performed monologue Danny Glover delivers about what the “white voice” represents and why it brings success. However, this key moment gets undercut when Glover demonstrates what he’s talking about and his voice is comically replaced. The gimmick permeates the picture and quickly starts to feel like little more than a gag that ran out of gas too quickly. And since so many African American performers working today can code-switch on a dime and have a full range of “white voices” in their arsenal, it seems a major misstep not to enable the actors to create their own vocal impressions as the characters supposedly do.  The story of Sorry to Bother You turns on Cash’s ability to use his white voice better than anyone else—we must accept that his ability with this voice enables him to rise to the top faster than any other employee has before.  But his voice not only feels disconnected from his actions, it doesn’t seem at all distinctive from the other characters who possess this skill.

The choice that most undermines the picture may be the lead casting of Stanfield himself, though it may not be his fault. The actor has proven his talent from his first movie appearance in Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12 (2013), and he has gone on to key roles in Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope (2015), F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton (2015), and Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning Get Out (2017)—in which Stanfield utilizes a different kind of “white voice” and memorably delivers that film’s titular line. But the genial, slightly befuddled lackadaisicality he imbues Cash with, combined with the passive way the character is written, makes it difficult to stay engaged with this protagonists as the movie enters its heightened third act.  

Riley probably intends for Cash to function as an everyman caught in an absurd, out-of-control system that could swallow him whole. Much like Jonathan Pryce’s character Sam Lowery in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian cult classic Brazil (1985), Cash is a reactive character that crazy things happen to. But where low-level office drone Sam Lowery takes distinctive actions incited by his own imaginative personal quest, Cash’s motivations are really no different than the rest of his telemarketer friends.

The excellent supporting cast includes Tessa Thompson (Selma, Creed, and this same year’s Annihilation) as Cash’s artist/activist girlfriend; Steven Yeun (I Origins, Okja, and the TV series The Walking Dead) as a union organizer; and Armie Hammer (The Social Network, The Lone Ranger, Call Me by Your Name) as an Elon Musk type entrepreneur drunk on his own power and achievements. Each supporting actor brings energy to the proceedings that keep us hanging in, even after we’ve been overloaded.

The picture’s infectious revolutionary spirit and idiosyncratic sense of humor make it one of the more memorable films of the year, despite its disorganized and self-conscious implementation. In truth, I would rate this kind of début feature higher had it been made in the ‘60s, ‘70s, or ‘80s.  But in the last decade, when so many first-time filmmakers create consummately crafted work exploring vital, complex themes with the full potential uniquely inherent to great narrative cinema—not just the aforementioned Short Term 12 and Get Out, but recent films like Fruitvale Station, Columbus, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Margin Call, and so many more— Sorry to Bother You doesn’t achieve the same gravitas. Still, I’m glad I saw it, and I’m eager to see what Boots Riley does next.