Sorry to Bother You (2018) * *

Directed by:  Boots Riley

Starring:  Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Armie Hammer, Steven Yeun, Danny Glover, Terry Crews, Omari Hardwick, Patton Oswalt (voice), Lily James (voice), David Cross (voice)

In my college years, I was a telemarketer, and not a very good one.   I sold newspaper subscriptions over the phone and then I conducted lengthy, inane telephone surveys.    At least when I tried to sell the newspaper subscriptions, I was peddling a tangible product.    With the surveying job, I was keeping the respondent on the phone with nothing in it for him.   Either way, these were not jobs I was born to do.    The opening salvos of Sorry to Bother You capture the dreadful feeling of being an intrusive telemarketer.   In Boots Riley's film, the caller isn't just figuratively invading the potential customer's privacy, the poor caller is transported right into the person's bedroom, kitchen, or living room and interrupting whatever more important activity was going on at the time.   I am certain every telemarketer has felt that way at one time or another.

Those scenes were funny, but then the movie walks the fine line between satire and absurdity, then blurs it, and then obliterates it in a nonsensical subplot which takes the satire way, way too far.    There is a temptation to commend Riley for having the steely nerve and creativity to go there.   It is a temptation I can resist.   The movie loses control.   Even Get Out, which also was an edgy satire of racism disguised as a horror film, knew to stay within certain boundaries of storytelling.   It had a story to tell first.    Sorry to Bother You transforms into an exercise in pushing the envelope while losing focus on what it wanted to push the envelope about in the first place.

Lakeith Stanfield, who also co-starred in Get Out, plays Cassius Green (as in "cash is green"), a chronic unemployable whose career trajectory has stalled.    He lives in his uncle's garage with his artist girlfriend Detroit (Thompson), and privacy issues ensue when the garage door opener is activated.   He applies for a telemarketing job at RegalView, which sells worthless encyclopedia sets.  (The company bigwigs apparently forgot the Internet exists).    He is busted for lying on his resume, but he is hired anyway because the call center needs warm bodies.    At first, Cassius is sinking, but then his co-worker Langston (Glover), encourages him to use his "white voice", which comforts the respondent instead of frightening him.    Once Cassius uses the white voice, he becomes a star and earns a promotion to "power caller", while his friend Squeeze (Yeun) and Detroit hold work stoppages to promote unionization.    Naturally, since Cassius is finally making cash for the first time in his life, he has no qualms about crossing his friends' picket line.

The power callers don't sell encyclopedias, but instead pitch potential investors for the omnipresent  WorryFree, (using the white voice exclusively) which provides three hots and a cot for workers in exchange for fourteen-hour days performing practically slave labor.    If it sounds like a prison, it also looks eerily like one when you see the living arrangements.    Cassius also has no moral compunction in selling investors on WorryFree, because the money is rolling in and he can afford to move out of his uncle's garage.    However, this causes tension between he and Detroit, since he crosses picket lines and she is loyal to the unionization effort.

Once Cassius meets WorryFree CEO Steve Lift (Hammer- in a wild performance further adding to the actor's quality character roles), then the movie devolves into a nightmarish, dark morass from which it never recovers.    The proceedings go way over the top, and turn into an unrestrained mess.   The white voice joke grows stale also, trying to squeeze every laugh it can out of it.    By then, the movie had grown so absurd that the laughs ceased altogether.    Sorry to Bother You starts with identifiable themes and considerable momentum, until it halts itself. 

Stanfield's earlier scenes maintain a hangdog charm.    His body language betrays a total lack of confidence, and we can relate to him.    The actors remain undaunted as they stay likable and believable in the face of mounting insanity and plot developments which might give them whiplash.  This is not to say Riley is an untalented screenwriter and director.    He just didn't know when to rein his material in.