His artist girlfriend is turning activist. The union organiser who started the strike is taking a keen interest in her. There are protests nationwide over the Worry Free Corporation whose creepy ads make what looks like slave labour an option for the poor. Worry Free are Cash's employer's biggest client. In the sumptuous upper floor of the Power Callers Cash's mentor, a smooth rapper type with an eye-patch ("white voice only on this floor"), tells him not to worry about changing the world but instead going with the way it's heading. Cash is feeling the benefit of the big paydays but also the conscience-tugging of the real friends he was starting to make at the call centre and his own dear Detroit (the girlfriend, her mother wanted an American name). Will the mighty Steve Lift of Worry Free and his massive plans for the world's future buy it with Cash? No spoilers. Too much to say, anyway.
This is a satire that substantially could have been written hundreds of years ago by the likes of Jonathon Swift; a savage eye on the greed of the rich but laced with such off hand comedy that its dogma feels like part of that (yet still serious). As I watched I thought of Brazil, O Lucky Man, Eternal Sunshine, and the restlessly inventive humour of Being John Malkovich. This film is not really like any of those but it has the same strength of vision of all of them and the nervy humour they run on: it's on the same shelf.
Lakeith Stanfield brings a humanising confusion to Cash who never seems comfortable with either being poor or what he has to do to be rich. His constant shifting, oddly enough, allows us into what might have played as a cipher (in a different way think John Cusack in Being John Malkovich) to hand the satire on. His fidgety perception let us cope with the speed and frenetic gear changing the story needs. Armie Hammer, looking very like John Krasinsky in a full beard, plays the corporate ubermensch with a terrifying mix of alphacrat and frat boy. The stopmotion business video (that anagramatically namechecks Michel Gondry) is a jawdropping vision inside his head. The cast is hugs and everyone works but special mention should go to Stephen Yeun as Squeeze (the ex-Sign Twirlers Union rep) and Tessa Thompson as Detroit who brings real personality to a role that looks like it had its own art department.
References fly past in thick currents which warrant at least a second viewing but this highly energetic film puts enough in the central arc to let those go by if they get fatiguing. This also reminds me in tone of other films of the strong end of '90s early '00s years of great American mainstream pieces like Fight Club, American Psycho or Amelie: grab what you can along the way and have a look at it when you get a breath. I can think of people who might well think it loses its way in the third act but I think that's pacing rather than plotting, after a light adjustment I kept going with it and felt rewarded. It changes at the root but the result is worked for and works.
On that, the conceits like the deliberately dubbed look of the white voices (Detroit's is hilarious) one weird moment when a character who warns against using his name has it blanked by both audio and visual blurring, the WTF effect of Cash's attempt at ad lib rapping, that corporate video and so much more give this rich mix enough chewy fruit and nuts to give it a life well beyond the first cinema run. The market doesn't really work like this any more but if this were the '80s or even the early '90s this would be a cult film right out of the gate. Sick of the insidious cultural support creeping in for giant capitalists and the rising extreme right? Go and see this. It's the right kind of hate.
And it's bloody funny.
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