A tall tale for cataclysmic times

WITHIN THE PANTHEON OF AMERICAN folk heroes, no figure walks taller than Paul Bunyan.

-  JUDY BERMAN

A giant lumberjack accompanied by a blue ox named Babe, he's often credited with carving the Grand Canyon and spilling the trail of water that would become the Mississippi River. Tall tales aside, he literally towers over our national landscape in the form of flannel-clad roadside statues scattered from coast to coast-monuments to the rugged workingmen of an ascendant nation.

A century after the Bunyan legend's heyday, the U.S. is, to say the least, no longer on the rise. So it's fitting that Boots Riley, the veteran rapper and activist who pivoted to the screen with 2018's surreal anticapitalist satire Sorry to Bother You, has created a new supersize folk hero for our tumultuous times. The protagonist of his equally offbeat-and even more daringly radical-Amazon dark comedy I'm a Virgo is a 13-ft.-tall Black teenager named Cootie, portrayed with gentle-giant naiveté by When They See Us standout Jharrel Jerome. And instead of roaming free across the country, he spends his first 19 years under unofficial house arrest.