Boots Riley’s innovative ‘Sorry to Bother You’ is full of energy — and anxiety
“Sorry to Bother You” is as fresh as today’s newspaper — or a blog post — or a tweet from a minute ago. It’s a response to what is going on right now, and it feels like it, not only in content, but in form. It is charged by the madness of this particular moment in history. Writer-director Boots Riley isn’t cowed by the madness, but energized by it, and the result is this weird, funny, unsettling film.
The old rules don’t apply anymore, so Riley throws them out and comes up with new ways of presentation. When his protagonist, Cash (Lakeith Stanfield), a telemarketer, calls someone on the phone, we literally see his desk drop clumsily into that person’s house.