The Revolutionary Absurdity of Boots Riley

The scene is straight out of Boots Riley's madcap moviemaking handbook

- By Jason Parham. Photographs by Simone Niamani Thompson

In a city where Black residents have been steadily priced out, the two of us sit-Riley wearing one of his signature hats, me hatless-swapping stories over lunch as rock music drains from the speakers above us. This is Oakland, the director's longtime home, and perhaps our talk wouldn't feel so surreal if it weren't the exact kind of thing Riley, impresario of all things Black and bizarre, would write into one of his scripts. Ext. A Japanese fusion restaurant. Two Black men chow down on fried chicken, pondering their existence. As an artist, Riley embodies a kind of allegorical immodesty. How to put it? He thrives in contradiction, happily welcomes what he calls the "beautiful clutter" of life. It has become a mirror for his gloriously hyphy cinematic staging: He doesn't build worlds so much as stretch the one we already inhabit to its fantastical extreme.

Where his 2018 cult film Sorry to Bother You swerved into the funk and fuss of late-stage capitalism, manipulating the gonzo curiosity of science fiction to make a decidedly Black satire about labor, survival, and what, if anything, it means to sell out, his latest endeavor, I'm a Virgo, cranks the bass. It's a seven-episode ride about a 13-foot-tall, comic-book-obsessed Black teenager named Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) who, after years of being hidden from the world by his adoptive parents for fear that he'll be exploited-or killed-ventures into the cosmos of Oakland, where the gentrifying city, policed by a white vigilante lawman known as the Hero, greets him with wonder and revulsion.