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Riley nailed multiple targets at once in making a brutal satire you can dance to (or organize off of) and made us feel in our bones a reductio-ad-absurdum premise whose ideas on race are neither so absurd nor so far removed from reality.

My first screening is a powerful punch in the gut. Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You is a brilliant and biting satire on socio-economic structures of oppression in the US, from the neo-liberal vestiges of slavery to the commodification and dehumanisation of labour.

As a broad allegory of late-stage capitalism colonising racial identity and co-opting individual principles, the film bristles with invention and ingenuity.

The movie is not just Marxist but materialist at heart. . . . But I don’t want to freight this carnivalesque jaunt with too much European historical baggage—or reinforce the tendency of reviews to frame it only in relation to white artwork. This film is black on the inside, too, reaching back through hip-hop and black cinema to a deep tradition of black satire.

A damning portrait of things as they are in the US, this movie’s accurate and wild version of the present moment is Brechtian—alienated, sardonic, and disreputable. Boots Riley’s vision, which combines Repo Man and Idiocracy yet remains wholly his own, encompasses shit jobs, union organizing, and horrible tech billionaires who turn people into lifelong slaves and captive half humans desperate for rebellion.

It’s a comedy with a lot on its mind, to be sure. But what Riley has accomplished with this film is notable because of all the ways it could fall flat but doesn’t. (Just think of the flaccid political comedy that SNL peddles on a weekly basis.) We are living in a historical moment that is, quite frankly, unbelievable — it seems more and more that life is simply beyond satire. Boots Riley begs to differ.

The movie isn’t a rigid thesis: it’s a conversation starter. More urgently, it’s a fantasy: Riley has given us a fully imagined, theatrical, comical universe, our present-day political maelstrom pushed to its oddest ends. You can’t limit the movie’s meaning to a single idea.

It may end up being the most politically and culturally relevant movie of the year. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s far from perfect: The pacing is herky-jerky, and even a wild work of fantasy-satire like this one doesn’t have to drive every one of its ideas into our heads with such a heavy mallet. But Sorry to Bother You has energy and passion, two qualities in short supply in filmmaking these days.

The urgency coursing through Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You makes it a perfect movie for the blazing summer of resistance. When Riley’s debut feature played in Sundance in January, it seemed like African-American lysergic futurism. Six months later, even its most surreal moments are less prophetic than terrifyingly close to ordinary life in 2018.

My first experience was uncomfortable but not unpleasant, my mind scrambling to make sense of what was going on—although that was also the fun of it. Audiences will enjoy Sorry to Bother You in one go, but the film invites and can stand up to multiple viewings, in much the same way that complex rap lyrics benefit from repeated plays and familiarity gained from memorization.

Riley's direction is energetic, copious, precise, and unflinching in the face of the turmoil that he conjures and the trouble to which he seemingly bears witness. His dialogue has both a literary and expressive lilt that’s far from screenwriter-ese and the forthright and subtle actors lend it both a declamatory precision and a spontaneous briskness.

It’s fair to say that “Sorry to Bother You” sticks to its own script, but crucial to add that the script in question flips, swerves, meanders and all but explodes in a flurry of ideas and inspirations.