Having already stuck the boot into capitalism with his superb satire Sorry to Bother You, rapper, activist and filmmaker Boots Riley is back with another serve of sweet political comedy, only this time it’s a series. You can watch I’m a Virgo on Prime Video now.
Moonlight’s Jharrel Jamone stars as Cootie, a sweet-natured, amiable Black teenager, with one major difference: he’s 13 feet tall. His parentage is murky, but he’s raised by his protective Uncle Martisse (Mike Epps) and Aunt Lafrancine (Carmen Ejogo) who shield him from the outside world, knowing that the spectre of the Large Scary Black Man will make life hard for the poor kid.
But of course, being a curious young man, he eventually sneaks out, finding friendship with car-mad Felix (Brett Gray), laid back Scat (Allius Barnes) and activist Jones (Kara Young). And possibly love with cute fast food worker Flora (Olivia Washington).
But of course, not everyone is so benign, and trouble comes in the form of The Hero (Walton Goggins, always a plus), a tech fortune nepo baby who has reimagined himself as a law-and-order superhero and decided that awkward, lovable Cootie is a perfect nemesis – even though the poor kid just wants to hang out with his friends.
Sweet, surreal, and sharply satirical, I’m a Virgo trucks in Riley’s familiar concerns of race, class, and capitalism, a kind of urban slice of magical surrealism that doesn’t let mere plausibility get in the way of the points its making. If Sorry to Bother You was a hip hop cover of Alex Cox’s Repo Man, I’m a Virgo riffs on all those heartfelt “special kid heals a community” stories, only refusing to get as treacly as the average film of that stripe. It’s defiantly, definitively its own thing: raucously funny, righteously angry, and with a heart as big as its hero.
