“If you get shown a problem, but have no idea how to control it, you get used to the problem.” – Squeeze.
Non-spoiler review: "It's an episode of Black Mirror, but you can feel it in your skin because you're living in it."
Spoiler review: The film centers around Cassius Green, who lives in his uncle's garage, struggling to make ends meet. Out of desperation, he gets a job at a call center selling magazine subscriptions, where he starts every cold call with a "sorry to bother you." On his first day, he meets a coworker, Squeeze, who invites him to join a union to fight the unfair working conditions, to which he reluctantly agrees. After a while, he learns how to do a "white voice," masking his normal speaking voice with a more confident, upbeat tone (or so it was described). While all this is happening, Squeeze and the rest of his colleagues are arranging a walk-out, shutting down phone lines during the company’s busiest hours, demanding fair wages and better working conditions, to which Cassius again reluctantly agrees.
Cassius starts doing really well at the job and is promoted to a power caller, which is the same job but earns more money and screws over more people. The 'white voice' is off-putting to his girlfriend and friends, which he initially treats like a party trick, but over time, he uses it like a second language. Throughout the film, we are introduced to a rebel group called The Left Eye, which his girlfriend Detroit is a part of. It is a dramatized (or so Boots Riley thought at the time) version of the far-left Democratic Party that protests the normalization of modern-day slavery.
It’s later revealed that the company Cassius works for is called WorryFree, a company that hires people to live and work at WorryFree facilities, advertised as easy money-earning jobs. The Left Eye protests their unethical labor practices because you essentially sign your life away working for them. Cassius is caught between a rock and a hard place, faced with choosing between morals and money.
My favorite bit: It was a raw performance piece by Detroit (played by Tessa Thompson), where she protests the cobalt mining happening in the Congo by reciting, "You're nothing but a misguided midget asshole with dreams of ruling the world," from a 1985 film titled The Last Dragon. She starts on stage in a leather crop top and underwear designed to look like a raised middle finger. Then, she instructs the audience to throw phone batteries at her (presumably because our phones are one of the tools the tech industry uses against us) and balloons filled with sheep’s blood (likely a Biblical reference to a sacrificial lamb, but I haven’t puzzled this out quite yet), while she recites a poem throughout the assault. We watch as her body flinches and her voice falters, then straightens and rallies, while the batteries hit and the stage bleeds red from the balloons. Cass soon yells for the show to stop. She tells him to leave before returning to the stage and putting on a police helmet to shield her head from the upcoming attacks. (Black Girl Nerds)
It was jarring to watch because it’s the same cause I’m just now learning more about, but this performance fell flat for me because it didn’t inform the audience why it’s important to learn about Congo. This piece reads more as a normalization of violence against women, which is the exact thing we want to see less of, especially in Congo, where women are brutalized and unlike Detroit, it isn't seen. Maybe that was the point, but the execution didn’t convey that well. This seemed more like a behavioral experiment on what the human mind is capable of doing to another person once violence is deemed acceptable in society, which made me think of The Lottery by Shirley Jackson instead.
This scene also highlights her hypocrisy by using her own "white voice" while mingling with rich people to get them to buy her art. I think the "white voice" is just a variation of the customer service voice— a well-known tone you use in a customer service job or any professional setting, along with "corporate speak." It’s off-putting and creepy, but I do know that it's better to put up with that than to be broke. Although Boots Riley did take the concept of selling your soul to the devil in a whole other direction in his 2018 film Sorry to Bother You.