Review: 'I'm a Virgo' Goes Big – The New York Times

Boots Riley doesn’t intention small. In his 2018 directorial debut movie, “Sorry to Hassle You,” the frontman of the revolution-minded hip-hop group the Coup created a chaotic fantasia of company exploitation that strained on the seams of its indie-movie clothes.

In his magnificently batty TV collection, “I’m a Virgo,” which arrives on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, the display could also be smaller. However Riley’s satirical ambitions are 13 toes tall.

That’s additionally the peak of his protagonist, Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), an Oakland teenager whose aunt and uncle (Carmen Ejogo and Mike Epps) have stored him hidden to guard him from a world that may see him as a monster. “Persons are at all times afraid,” his aunt says, “and you’re a 13-foot-tall Black man.”

As he approaches maturity, the partitions and door frames of the home can’t take the association for much longer. Neither can Cootie, who longs to see a world that he’s skilled solely by way of TV commercials and comedian books. He sneaks out, makes mates with some younger neighbors — they take him on a joyride, Cootie squatting on the automotive as if it have been a skateboard — and meets the world.

As in “Sorry to Hassle You,” that world is a surreal, capitalist-dystopian model of our personal, equal components magic realism and B-movie sci-fi. The airwaves are stuffed with disturbing fast-food advertisements and a cult-hit cartoon, a forbidden episode of which places viewers right into a catatonic state of existential despair. Characters are matter-of-factly given supernatural powers, together with Cootie’s crush, Flora (Olivia Washington), who has super-speed talents. Like Cootie, she has to modulate her physicality, forcing herself to maneuver at a painstakingly gradual tempo to be able to interact with the regular-speed world.

Riley makes Cootie’s scenario really feel claustrophobically actual utilizing sensible results, together with compelled perspective, which give the collection a extra handmade, approachable really feel in contrast with at this time’s smooth, chilly C.G.I. showcases. Cootie hunches into buildings, drinks beer from pitchers, holds envelopes and telephones along with his fingers like they have been doll equipment. (There’s additionally a candy, comedian scene exploring the logistics of shedding one’s virginity with a associate lower than half one’s measurement.)

Cootie’s towering mass can also be an thought: It’s a larger-than-life manifestation of the way in which society perceives Black youths as risks. Black boys, as an example, are routinely seen as being older than their precise age.

Jerome, who performed one of many wrongfully convicted Central Park 5 in “When They See Us,” makes Cootie’s effort to handle his physique touchingly actual. He has a proper, shy, honest method, well mannered and cautious, as if to efface his measurement and menace. He additionally has a way of marvel, as when a pal turns up his stereo and Cootie experiences bass for the primary time in his sheltered life: “It sinks to your bones and you’ll really feel the bottom and the sky on the identical time,” he says. In his neighborhood, he’s acquired much less as a freak than as a pleasant large.

However he finally attracts the scrutiny of the Hero (a superbly unbalanced Walton Goggins), a billionaire comic-book creator who has taken on the world-weary vigilante persona of one in every of his personal characters. Sporting a goofy white supersuit and a propeller backpack, he flies across the Bay Space nabbing minor offenders and quelling protests like a one-man surveillance state. (As Riley put it within the Coup’s “The Guillotine”: “We bought hella individuals/They bought helicopters.”)

You could possibly join the Hero to comic-book capitalists like Batman and Iron Man — and simply possibly to the real-life mogul, with a predilection for spaceflight and whirlybird drones, whose firm bankrolls this collection. “Virgo,” in its spirit of biff-bam-pow anticapitalism, is broadly involved with co-optation, with promoting out, with whether or not the grasp’s gadget-toolbelt can ever dismantle the grasp’s secret lair.

The power to make us root for the overdog, in spite of everything, is without doubt one of the super-est superpowers that popular culture has. (That is additionally the relentless theme of the collection’s Amazon authoritarian-superhero sibling, “The Boys.”) Comedian books have taught Cootie to imagine in justice the way in which his aunt taught him to imagine in astrology, and he holds onto this childlike religion even whereas the Hero paints him as a supervillain.

Their rising battle offers the minimal body for the primary season of “Virgo,” which at seven episodes is extra about world constructing than plot. There’s a little bit of “Invisible Man” picaresque to Cootie’s journey, which leads him to a cult that sees him as a prophesied savior and a streetwear firm that hires him as a mannequin in a racially stereotyped advert marketing campaign. There’s additionally a Jonathan Swift streak of social caricature in its story of a noble large among the many little individuals.

However the anticapitalist fervor is 100% Riley. In “Sorry to Hassle You,” a rising star in a telemarketing middle discovers a company plot to create a piece pressure of horse-human hybrids. In “Virgo,” when Cootie will get concerned with an Occupy-style protest led by his activist pal Jones (Kara Younger), the Hero and the media demonize him. In each instances, when people show inconvenient, capitalism creates monsters.

Riley just isn’t afraid to place his agenda in boldface, triple-underlined. Because the Hero places it, describing the law-and-order themes of his comedian books, “All artwork is propaganda.” It’s an argument that Riley has made himself in interviews: “Each film is a message film.”

Nevertheless it speaks to Riley’s willingness to complicate his storytelling that he places his deeply held perception within the mouth of a megalomaniac vigilante. Certainly, one of many collection’s strangest however most insightful episodes, written by the playwright Michael R. Jackson (“A Unusual Loop”), is a personality research of the Hero that reveals how righteousness might be each armor and blinder.

Riotous and pressing, “I’m a Virgo” is hardly essentially the most delicate present of the 12 months. It’s, by its personal definition, propaganda. However it’s completely artwork.