SORRY TO BOTHER YOU REVIEW: Makes you wonder who is on the other side of the phone?

Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” is an adrenalin-shot of a comedy and a fearless dissection of identity politics, corporate malevolence, and the American tendency to look the other way when confronted with horror.

Don’t worry. “Sorry to Bother You” is no message-heavy, standard social commentary flick. It is a hysterical comedy, one of the funniest movies of the year.

Riley’s film wants, first and foremost, to entertain you, and it almost certainly will do that, especially if you’re willing to go with it on a funky journey, no matter where it takes you.

(Lakeith Stanfield), Cassius is living in a converted garage and he is broke, which annoys both his rent-starved landlord and his girlfriend, aspiring conceptual artist Detroit (Tessa Thompson). His very last chance to earn some money comes when he gets a job at a call centre – that 21st-century mix of the factory and the workhouse – wearing his phone headset in his grim little booth, desperately trying to make cold-call sales.

ABOVE: Danny Glover and LaKeith Stanfield.

Something in his phone manner deters potential customers until the grizzled old-timer in the booth next to him, played by Danny Glover, tells Cassius to use a “white voice” (yeah, you heard us correctly, ‘use the white voice.’)

This he does, and is instantly a mega-selling sensation: all his cloying mannerisms and faux-casual friendliness, which were so awful from a black person, sound great in whitespeak, especially that ingratiatingly insincere declaration in the title.

Cash starts to move up the corporate ladder quickly, eventually getting access to the golden elevator taken only by the “power callers.” The men and women who work on the top floor—where only the “white voice” is allowed—don’t sell books. They sell things people really shouldn’t be selling, and Cash is good at that too, drawing the attention of the maniacal Steve Lift (Armie Hammer) and the disgust of Detroit and his fellow co-workers, who have been struggling to unionize for worker’s rights.

And as his coworkers at RegalView try to unionize, Cash is caught between old friendships and loyalties to the bosses.

ABOVE: Armie Hammer and LaKeith Stanfield.

Sorry to Bother You has obvious similarities to the movie-making of Spike Lee, and specifically his latest picture, BlacKkKlansman, about a black cop who by pretending to be white over the telephone is able to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. In the globalized world of marketing and direct sales, the imposture of voice is very important, and the illusion of white identity can give black workers a whole new opportunity.

But the “white voice” is actually more surreal than this. Instead of Stanfield doing an impression, he is dubbed by an actual white actor: David Cross. Another power caller, known enigmatically as Mr — (Omari Hardwick) is dubbed by Patton Oswalt. And even Detroit, when she presents her site-specific performance pieces to an audience, has her Eliza Doolittle moment, finding that she is doing a posh white British voice, dubbed by Lily James.

 ABOVE: Tessa Thompson and Lakeith Stanfield in Sorry to Bother You.

THE DIRECTOR: As a member of the rap group the Coup, Riley has long made challenging political music, and Sorry to Bother You is a similarly confrontational work that rushes at every topical issue it can think of. The film perhaps tries to tackle too much in its 105-minute running time. But oddly that excess helps it feel all the more suited to the charged landscape of 2018, one where politics courses through so much of daily life.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

The film’s first big metatextual gag is the “white voice” that Cash adopts to rise through the ranks at his job. Sorry to Bother You is an unsubtle work for an unsubtle era, with a great cast of talented cast and deserves to be one of the season’s cult hits.

5/5 STARS