In many ways continuing and deepening the cultural conversation sparked by last year’s Get Out, the current social satire Sorry to Bother You offers another brazen sci-fi/horror spin on contemporary American race relations, laced — as was Get Out — with sly humor.

While the films are stylistically different — whereas Get Out was disciplined and slick, Sorry to Bother You is loose and scrappy — they both tell urgent stories.

Lakeith Stanfield (not by coincidence, Get Out’s breakout star) leads Sorry to Bother You by playing Cassius, a directionless young man in Oakland, California, who takes a seemingly innocuous job as a telemarketer. Yet in the cinematic world created by first-time writer-director Boots Riley (better known for his work as a hip-hop artist and producer) nothing is innocuous.

Even the title has a sharp double meaning. Beyond simply evoking a platitude that telemarketers use with customers, as a title title Sorry to Bother You is a sort of sarcastic disclaimer for the whole movie. For Sorry to Bother You is not some gentle editorial about social issues; it is a slap in the face to anyone who feels complacent about problems vexing the United States.

Riley uses his film to tell us in forceful and unexpected ways that doing nothing is not an option when faced with crimes against humanity. He makes his message universal by employing a wild allegory, thus affirming that any indignities unscrupulous corporate and/or governmental entities visit upon vulnerable populations (e.g., economically-challenged African-Americans) are merely precursors to whatever those same entities will eventually do to everyone.

Therefore, the implicit theme of Sorry to Bother You — or, to put it more accurately, the predominant implicit theme among many — is that our window for protecting fellow citizens who are under socioeconomic assault may be closing rapidly. If we let that window shut without resistance, we’re all complicit in what happens next. It’s a whole new way of contextualizing #BlackLivesMatter.

This is heavy stuff to put across in a movie, so it’s no small accomplishment that Sorry to Bother You is as entertaining as it is provocative.

Even allowing that Riley’s script is flawed (like so many fantasists, he conjures outrageous situations only to encounter difficulty while trying to resolve them), there is much to admire in his idiosyncratic storytelling.

Creating context

Early scenes in Sorry to Bother You depict Cassius’ relationship with his artist girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson). Although they’re struggling financially (as represented by the fact that the couple lives in someone’s garage), they’re happy and supportive of each other. That is, unless Cassius gets into one of his frequent despondent moods; worrying about problems he can’t control, such as human mortality. Detroit coins a succinct phrase for simultaneously characterizing and derailing Cassius’ doom-and-gloom pronouncements: “Can we not talk about the sun exploding today?”

It’s a brilliant line on many levels. Not only is it brief, funny and memorable, but it contains everything we need to know about Cassius before his adventure gets weird: He’s a seer and a thinker and a worrier. What better person to recognize hidden dangers in the world of telemarketing? And what better protagonist for a storyteller to put on a journey that will test that protagonist’s character?

As the story progresses, Cassius trades his idealism for the consolation of a fat paycheck — and by doing so, he defies the evidence of his own eyes. For much of the film, the sun is exploding right in front of him (metaphorically speaking) and yet he barrels forward. His journey is from someone who frets about imagined disasters to someone who dangerously compartmentalizes real disasters.

This trajectory, which we can track through the repeated use of Detroit’s line about the sun exploding, allows Riley to dramatize how complacency takes root.

Takeaway: When introducing characters, imbue them with strong perspectives

Dishonesty is the best policy

Lies are woven into every aspect of Sorry to Bother You.

In the first scene, Cassius lies about his past to get the telemarketing job. Throughout the film, characters discuss the popularity of WorryFree, a hugely successful business offering citizens lifetime contracts to reside in factories where they work without receiving pay — essentially, voluntary slavery. The ubiquitous ad campaign for WorryFree sells a horrible lie; that the business model is predicated upon convenience, when obviously the real core concept is exploitation.

Riley’s script achieves thematic unity by weaving another type of lying into Cassius’ journey, thereby fusing two different aspects of the film’s storytelling: Rather than falling victim to an untruth propagated by others, Cassius lies to himself. And he does so to become (wink-wink) worry free. In other words, to not talk about the sun exploding. This might be the most important idea that Riley puts across with his incendiary storyline; the disturbing notion that we embolden those who lie to us by hiding from truths we find inconvenient. It’s a short leap from a small rationalization to a wholesale disregard for fact.

Similarly, secrets — another form of lies — permeate Sorry to Bother You. Cassius covets and eventually utilizes a special elevator that leads to a secret office. Later, he ends up in the labyrinth beneath a mansion and discovers horrors within a secret laboratory. One clever scene features a patron asking a bartender for “the good stuff,” at which point the bartender opens a secret compartment in a whiskey bottle to reveal a smaller bottle hidden within.

Takeaway: Create thematically-charged puzzles that your characters (and audiences) can solve

Let’s get weird

It should be apparent by now that very little of the actual plot for Sorry to Bother You has been revealed thus far. Like the mind-bending films of Michel Gondry (who gets name-checked in Riley’s movie), Sorry to Bother You is a deeply strange movie better discovered than described.

Some small examples will suffice to indicate the picture’s methodology.

At his telemarketing job, Cassius sells hardbound encyclopedias. In 2018. Nobody ever remarks about the absurdity of the product or the unlikelihood of Cassius becoming a successful salesperson at the company. Subtle touches like this help the audience accept, both consciously and subconsciously, that Sorry to Bother You takes place in an alternate reality of Riley’s imagination.

Another nuance along this line involves the speaking style that Cassius uses at work. Upon the advice of a black co-worker, Cassius adopts “white voice” (connoting not just ethnic identity but also socioeconomic privilege), so when he speaks in “white voice,” the audience hears the familiar tones of comedy actor David Cross instead of Stanfield’s own voice. Unlike the encyclopedia bit, the “white voice” device isn’t subtle — it’s an in-your-face reminder of the different Americas that black and white people experience.

Sorry to Bother You gets weirder as it goes along, eventually traveling to such bizarre places that Detroit’s freaky performance art routine (which involves public nudity, water balloons, and quotes from the cult movie The Last Dragon) feels of a piece with the rest of the picture. All of this serves a deliberate purpose, because the second half of Sorry to Bother You involves an outlandish sci-fi twist that would have felt inappropriate in a different context.

Riley doesn’t get weird for the sake of getting weird — he does so because that’s the only path leading to his intended destination.

Takeaway: To quote David Bowie, turn and face the strange