Few directors are playing on Boots Riley’s whimsical level. Across his TV series I’m A Virgo and his movies Sorry To Bother You and I Love Boosters, Riley’s projects stand out through their bright use of color and costumes; funky music; a DIY multimedia approach that incorporates practical effects, 2D animation, and stop-motion; maximalist production design; and an unmissable streak of sociopolitical commentary. But like a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, Riley coats his thought-provoking messages with a healthy dose of surrealism, to entertain, inform, and maybe even provoke a conversation. This otherworldly imagery sets Riley’s projects apart visually, but also doubles as a Trojan Horse to emphasize the systems of oppression, social inequality, and racist issues plaguing us today.
In Riley’s feature debut, Sorry To Bother You, Cassius “Cash” Green (LaKeith Stanfield) works at a call center to make rent, discovering that the bland company he works for also doubles as a military supplier and exploits what is essentially slave labor. One of the movie’s funniest yet most poignant sequences is when Cash’s older coworker (Danny Glover) teaches his new colleague how to use his “white voice” to sound wealthier on the phone to customers, earning their trust and their money. That talent leads him to advance in the company in the middle of a union drive, giving him an opportunity for a promotion at the expense of losing the union a vote. But working for an evil corporation naturally has its disadvantages. Eventually, Cash’s girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) no longer tolerates her partner working for such an ethically dubious company. And it really is dubious: Cash is invited to the billionaire CEO’s home where he learns that Steve Lift (Armie Hammer) is turning humans into half-horse hybrids to be more productive. When Cash tries to expose the company for its cruelty, public opinion actually sides with the company and its technical achievements, another pointed social commentary.
Riley approaches this absurdist storyline with striking visual panache. While the “white voice” joke is amusingly dubbed by performers like David Cross and Patton Oswalt, it underscores how Black employees are expected to change to fit white spaces to potentially advance in their careers. Some moments are teased early before the full joke is revealed later on, like ads in the background for an ominous-sounding company called WorryFree that promises applicants a lifetime of work and a place to live, giving indentured servitude a tech startup makeover. As the film goes on, the absurdities pile up, and Sorry To Bother You crescendos with the reveal that the wealthy CEO is turning people desperate for a job and housing in Oakland’s increasingly unaffordable real estate market into horse-human hybrids, a physical Trojan Horse against capitalist exploitation. The equisapiens are a sight to behold, and Riley uses them both to shock the audience and represent how companies reduce people to a means of production, treating them like animals.
In I’m A Virgo, instead of the absurdity building as the series goes on, it shapes the narrative and in some cases, is baked into the characters’ DNA. Riley’s show follows a 13-foot-tall young Black man named Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) as he enters the outside world after his aunt and uncle hid him for his safety throughout his childhood. The show’s rollicking story features many of Riley’s hallmarks—pointed critiques of broken systems and attempts to raise class consciousness—but it’s his most thoroughly unreal, at least visually. It’s always a sight gag to see Jerome adapt to a world not built for his oversized character, squeezing into a fast food restaurant, playing in the scrappy DIY-style home Riley and the production design team imagines a 13-foot-tall young man might call home, falling in love with a woman less than half his size, and taking a ride with friends in their convertible (although he’s several feet taller than everyone else in the car).
Despite his size, Cootie is a gentle giant, curious about the world he’s only ever seen on TV. Riley uses the eye-catching effect of more than doubling his main character’s height to criticize the way Black men are treated by the world by the world around them, endlessly ogled and penalized for simply existing. In addition to Riley’s corporate pillorying, he pokes and prods at the way Black people are commodified and sold to the public. In one episode, Cootie is exploited at the local mall as a kind of sideshow attraction for strangers to gawk at, and later, a cult-like group comes to worship him, further exoticizing him. Riley ties these moments to the history of mistreatment and objectification of Black people in a conversation between Cootie and his aunt, laying out the context of the past and connecting it to the present. Riley has a lengthy runway to explore several issues over the course of seven episodes, including a hospital leaving the poor to die, community organizing, and even Cootie’s disillusionment over his favorite superhero (Walton Goggins), a fascist Batman-like figure obsessed with keeping law and order. It’s hard not to see some parallels between the so-called Hero and self-proclaimed vigilantes who profile Black people, all by Riley’s outrageous design.
I Love Boosters moves the lens back towards industry, trading call centers and tech companies for sweatshops and fashion houses. Corvette (Keke Palmer) leads a group of boosters as they steal clothes from boutiques that belong to Christie Smith (Demi Moore), leading the designer to zealously crack down on shoplifters. The story accelerates when Jianhu (Poppy Liu) arrives from China with a special device that can vacuum up clothes faster than the boosters can take them. She sends them to the other side of the world to the sweatshop where Jianhu and her brother work, in order to hold the clothes for ransom until Christine can pay the factory workers fairly and stop the harmful practices killing factory workers.
Subtlety never being one of Riley’s strong suits, the writer-director goes all-in on the special device as a means to connect the affordability struggle here in the United States to the global struggle for economic justice. He makes his message a plot point and wraps it up with a layer of sci-fi: a teleportation device that also deconstructs materials and helps inspire a revolution in the fashion industry. Like in I’m A Virgo, Riley also takes aim at the media and its effect on people’s perception, sprinkling in bizarre man-on-the-street interviews that highlight specific narratives that benefit companies and special interests rather than expose the truth. By the end, he reveals that it was all part of a plan to misinform the public for profit, using stop-motion meat puppets to stand in for the voices that manipulate their audience. In one of the more dreamlike recurring moments, Corvette’s anxiety chases her as a rolling ball of random objects, like the boulder out of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, threatening to overwhelm her with its growing number of things to worry about. By the movie’s end, the boulder has been reduced to a pebble, and she’s no longer in danger of being overtaken by her troubles.
It can’t be easy to serve up feature films or streaming series with anti-capitalist messages to studio executives and distributors nervous about ticket sales and possibly alienated audiences. However, because the politics of his works are craftily wrapped in surrealist art that’s funny, emotional, and unique, Riley makes it all palatable enough to secure financing and reach audiences in a way few other similarly minded artists have achieved. Riley, like many of his characters, is an underdog making sense of the senseless, one making art and community to survive.
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