Note: This review contains mild spoilers.
It is not an everyday occurrence that I see a film that not only stretches the boundaries of its genre, but actively expands that genre. The highly anticipated and critically acclaimed Sorry to Bother You, written and directed by influential hip-hop artist Boots Riley, is a film that shows what a comedic film should be in 2018. It also makes my job of reviewing it really, really difficult—not just because I want to avoid major spoilers, but because it forwards such a singular vision that comparing it to any other film does both works a disservice.
If you can go in to this movie without knowing much about it, I recommend doing that, but perhaps a basic plot outline is necessary: Sorry to Both You follows the underemployed Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield, whose understated performance anchors the film) as he navigates his new job at a telemarketing firm—a job that he rather impressively bullshits his way into. Cassius soon finds that his “white voice” (hilariously supplied by David Cross) results in increased sales, catapulting him to the rank of Power Caller. While his newfound talent proves to be an escape route from the low-wage hell of direct sales, Cassius finds that being a Power Caller is not all day-drinking and minimalist corner offices—his sales talents soon put him in the sights of creepy CEO Steve Lift (Armie Hammer, who is unsurprisingly convincing as a Musk/Jobs/frat dude hybrid). Tessa Thompson, Steven Yeun, Terry Crews, and Danny Glover contribute wonderful supporting performances as well, although I can’t add much to this sentence without going into spoiler territory.
Sorry to Bother You is a comedy, but it also has touches of sci-fi and a huge heaping of social commentary laced with dark humor. It is probably the only comedy ever made where the unionization of low-wage workers is a major plot point, and definitely the only comedy that features a performance art piece that references both Yoko Ono’s 1964 Cut Piece and Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon; elsewhere in Sorry to Bother You, there’s an Amazon-esque company, WorryFree, that promises workers room and board in exchange for signing their lives away, a popular television show called I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me!, giant earrings reading MURDER MURDER MURDER and KILL KILL KILL that Cassius’s girlfriend Detroit wears, viral videos as activist praxis, one amazingly filmed sequence that features Armie Hammer’s character snorting a massive line of cocaine (so large that it takes up the bottom of the screen), a hunk-of-junk car with windshield wipers that have to be manually operated by its passengers, and a delightfully weird, animated stop-motion sequence on genetic engineering.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that you should go see Sorry to Bother You while it’s still in theaters. It is a major comedic achievement that will also make you think.