I first heard about Boots Riley when I was a teenager. Kill My Landlord, the title of the first album by his band The Coup, caught my eye. Soon I realized that I heard his name a lot: he was frequently mentioned in news coverage of West Coast protests.

Riley has been on the Left for a long time. His father, Walter Riley, was an antiwar activist at San Francisco State University in the 1960s before moving to Detroit to organize autoworkers. That’s where Boots was born in 1971. Later they moved back to Oakland, where Walter set up a civil-rights law practice. By the time the younger Riley was a teenager, Boots had joined the Progressive Labor Party and was organizing farmworkers. He met the two rappers who would go on to form The Coup with him while working part-time at UPS.

Boots is still in Oakland, and he’s still an organizer. But he has entered a new field: film and television. Sorry to Bother You, his first feature film, premiered in 2018. The movie combines Riley’s old-school Marxist politics with an out-there aesthetic sensibility. In early pitches to potential collaborators, Riley called it “an absurdist dark comedy with magical realism and science fiction, inspired by the world of telemarketing.”