“Sorry to Bother You,” Boots Riley’s 2018 directorial debut, was a cultural event: It announced Riley, who’d already made a career as a politically minded rapper, as a sharp critic of contemporary capitalism who could pair his ideas with grabby, memorable imagery. The cascade of reveals and visual transformations toward the end of that film, too good to spoil for the uninitiated, worked brilliantly as spectacle and made Riley’s case too: Under our current system, we all end up becoming beasts of burden.
Riley returns with a larger canvas and new expressions of familiar concerns with “I’m a Virgo.” Like “Sorry to Bother You,” which addressed the problems of its telemarketer characters, this series merges the prosaic with the surreal. On “I’m a Virgo,” we follow a 13-foot-tall man trying to figure out where he fits into his community and into the ongoing struggle for a fairer future. As played by Jharrel Jerome (of “Moonlight” and an Emmy winner for “When They See Us”), the massive fellow known as Cootie is taciturn, shy — understandably out of place. To work out, he bench-presses an entire car; his aunt and uncle (Mike Epps and Carmen Ejogo), raising him in their Oakland home despite being people of more typical stature, fret over how much food it takes to keep their nephew alive.
Epps and Ejogo play their roles with striking sensitivity, imbuing a sense of the stakes for Cootie from the first. This world, we’re told, hates giants, who find themselves the target of prejudiced violence; Ejogo and especially Epps (better known for his comedy acting) sell this well. They have a lot to be concerned about. Jerome, a truly gifted performer, conveys Cootie’s breaking out of inertia and his anger at what he’d missed in the first 19 years of his life under family protection. Cootie is only now entering the world through contact with new friends and, in particular, a love interest named Flora (Olivia Washington). Their pairing has a fundamental sweetness to it, with matching neuroses (and superpowers); nailing down the emotional beats here allows Riley to range farther and farther afield.
Given more running time and Amazon-scale resources, the director dares greatly — the simple fact of integrating a double-sized Jerome into physical space with his co-stars is a feat worth applauding. But as the sight of Cootie becomes more familiar, “I’m a Virgo” can at times be admirable in its weirdness more than it is gripping. The central conflict, involving a comic book superhero played by Walton Goggins and his manipulation of the system in order to enrich himself and impoverish the people, is clean and easily comprehensible (including in speeches delivered by Kara Young’s character, a friend and activist, explaining the ravages of corporate institutions). And some of the visual and stylistic flourishes of “I’m a Virgo” can feel like embroidery on a story that wants to be more plainly and briefly told.
But can you blame a creator for wanting to be outsized? There’s something pleasingly subversive about Riley taking money from a corporation on the scale of Amazon to make not merely a series opposed to capitalism but one so ornately itself, something impressive about the heft of his ambitions. In Cootie, Riley has engineered for himself a character that functions both in the realm of metaphor — as the 13-foot cudgel it’d take to dislodge inequity — and as a real person too. The show plays in archetypes; it’s an origin story for a superpowered young man. But Riley’s storytelling power lies in his ability, in the best moments of “I’m a Virgo,” to remind us that within his marvelously transformed characters beat hearts that yearn for something better.
“I’m a Virgo” launches on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, June 23.
