At the start of Boots Riley’s sci-fi comedy Sorry to Bother You, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield)—who goes by Cash—is unemployed, four months behind on rent, and down to filling his rust bucket’s gas tank with chump change. What’s the solution? Get a job, of course.

But this is the Oakland of an alternative (one hopes) future. There are no good jobs, only low-paying hustles—like that of Detroit (Tessa Thompson), Cash’s girlfriend, who twirls business signs on dead street corners to get by while she focuses on her art. If you’re not lucky enough to nab one of those jobs, you’re likely to sign up for a lifetime employment contract with the ironically named WorryFree, which houses its workers but barely pays them, trapping them in a system of outright, unabashed wage slavery.

Cash is, thankfully, able to nab a job as a telemarketer—hence the title—and as Riley’s rip-roaring, imaginative movie plays out, it’s a job that launches him on an outlandish, satirical, wonderfully political tour of America’s enduring problems with race and class, and, most especially, their intersection. In simpler terms: the movie is an adventure. It’s a tale in which each telemarketing call Cash makes is illustrated by scenes of him crashing into peoples’ living rooms, bedrooms, and saunas, as if the long arm of capitalism were literalized in the image of an office drone hitting people where they live. It’s a tale in which Cash, acting on the advice of an older employee (played by gravelly, devilish Danny Glover), starts using his “white voice”—his empowered, confident, desperation-free voice—to start having more luck with commissions. But instead of a whitened-up imitation coming out of Stanfield’s mouth, we hear the comically chipper voice of an actual white guy: David Cross.

In other words, Sorry to Bother You is a surreal ride. It touches on predominant conversations on race and class in our culture, like minorities’ ability to “code switch,” or hop back and forth between “white” grammar and demeanor and their own, at will. Unions, too, are a dominant theme, as an agitator in the telemarketing office named Squeeze (Steven Yeun) tries to get his fellow employees to unionize by organizing a strike. That sets Cash up for some inner conflict. Thanks to his eerily effective “white voice,” Cash gets promoted to “power caller”—a sure bet at nailing the commission—and he winds up landing a job upstairs, with the bigger accounts, the tighter dress code, and an obligation to completely divorce himself from the union struggle. To say nothing of what it costs his sense of integrity.

He’s got his reasons, which doesn’t make him right, but it doesn’t quite make him the bad guy, either. Riley is too smart to situate Sorry to Bother You on those didactically Manichean terms. His movie has the arc of a grand morality tale: getting a job upstairs, getting closer to the heart of corporate capital, only pushes Cash deeper into the movie’s strange, compromising rabbit hole than he was before. But this isn’t a story predicated on merely teaching him a lesson, even if he learns one. The movie isn’t a rigid thesis: it’s a conversation starter. More urgently, it’s a fantasy: Riley has given us a fully imagined, theatrical, comical universe, our present-day political maelstrom pushed to its oddest ends. You can’t limit the movie’s meaning to a single idea.

But if you were to try, you’d land somewhere in the realm of questions about accountability: what Cash owes to his fellow proletariat versus what he literally owes—for example, to his landlord, Sergio (Terry Crews), who’s his uncle, and who’s at risk of losing his house. Is Cash a sellout? The phrase not used in Sorry to Bother You, but invoked at most every turn, is “house negro.” That, you realize, is what people both in the bottom floors of the office and up top, where he eventually works, seem to think Cash is. He doesn’t rap, doesn’t sell drugs, and has never—as he eventually gets asked—“put a cap in someone’s ass.” Which makes him a clean, plausible candidate for corporate culture—even as, at a party, he gets goaded into rapping in front of the crowd because, even if he isn’t that kind of black man, he’s still very much a black man, and everything that happens to him from then on seems designed to remind him so.