I’m A Virgo review: Boots Riley makes a wonderfully weird TV show

Weirdos, rejoice, for the age of subtlety is passing from this world, and a new era is dawning: the time of the bizarre and the baroque. It began with HBO’s Watchmen and carried through to shows ranging from I Hate Suzie to I May Destroy You to Mrs. Davis. These kinds of high-concept, imaginative projects were once dismissed as mere “genre”; now, they’re rapidly changing what the powers that be view as prestige television.

The latest—and most audaciously strange—example of this phenomenon is
I’m A Virgo, the freewheeling, ultra-stylized, wonderfully messy new Prime Video series from Boots Riley (out June 23). Incredibly, it’s only the writer-director’s second project. The first was 2018’s equally over-the-top Sorry To Bother You, which helped launch the careers of LaKeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson.

Like that film, I’m A Virgo takes the concepts of Black subjugation and runaway capitalism to their logical extreme, swinging wildly between satire and drama and back again. It’s both a critique and a loving homage to the superhero genre, mashing together influences including, but not limited to, Roald Dahl, Do The Right Thing, and The Boys, plus authors ranging from Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre to James Baldwin and David Foster Wallace.

I’m a Virgo centers on a (quite literally) big idea: What happens when a 13-foot-tall Black man comes of age and ventures out into the wider world? That’s the plight—or, depending on how you look at it, the gift—of Cootie, played by When They See Us Emmy winner Jharrel Jerome.

Cootie grows up in Oakland, sheltered from prying eyes by his Aunt LaFrancine and Uncle Martisse (Carmen Ejogo and Mike Epps). His issues with fitting into a world not built for him range from the practical (“When you take a shit, I gotta take a coat hanger and chop the shit down in the toilet,” his uncle grouses) to the existential: Isolated and lonely, Cootie’s only window into larger society is TV and comic books.

But inevitably, like Candide did before him, our protagonist steps out of his cage and into the unknown, a wide-eyed innocent who has no idea what the world has in store for him. He makes fast friends with a group of kids from the neighborhood who accept him with open arms: Felix (Brett Gray), a guy in love with his car; the sweet, cartoon-adoring Scat (Allius Barnes); and Jones (Kara Young), a radical community organizer dedicated to liberating the neighborhood from the bonds of capitalism and racism. Along the way, Cootie falls hard for Flora (Olivia Washington), an ambitious fast-food worker who is gifted and cursed with a superpower of her own.

Outside his social circle, Cootie is both feared and revered, objectified by a slimy commercial agent and giant-worshipping cultists, turned into a symbol of liberation by his community, and demonized by racist white people. His nemesis is an eccentric billionaire who styles himself as simply “the Hero,” a Robocop-esque vigilante played with unhinged flair by character-acting great Walton Goggins. Beneath it all thrums the steady beat of the media juggernaut, from pundits to big businesses to a Simpsons-esque cartoon that’s both nihilistic and profoundly moving.

The delightful weirdness and vibrance of the series’ first few episodes give way to an abrupt and inevitable tragedy that changes the lives of the central characters forever. But Riley’s trademark humor, empathy, and trippy aesthetics live right alongside this darkness—and it doesn’t feel jarring at all. If anything, I’m a Virgo presents a hopeful vision of humanity that’s far removed from the cynicism of Sorry To Bother You.

Riley directed all seven episodes of the series; and on the writing side, he collaborated with a killer team that includes Pulitzer-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) and Marcus Gardley (The Chi, The Color Purple).

The cast is also wall-to-wall talented. Jerome anchors the show with his winning turn as Cootie, conveying both his sweetness and his anger, as well as his unbridled delight at every new thing he encounters in Riley’s teeming, colorful Oakland. Goggins manages to conjure a villain who’s both despicable and sympathetic—and it’s clear he’s having the time of his life playing such a specific brand of oddball. (Witness him dancing in his skivvies to, of all things, Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman.”) Gray, who also starred in When They See Us, takes Felix on a vivid emotional journey from easy joy to heavy grief.

Most of the ensemble is made up of actors taking on their first major roles—and making them sing. Washington is a highlight, conveying the depths of Flora’s brilliance and complexity as she falls in love with Cootie. (“You out to lunch, boy; but it’s at the same place I eat at,” she tells him lovingly after a round of weird, wild sex.) And keep an eye on Young, a Tony-nominated actor whose turn as Jones will hopefully be her screen breakout; with her charisma, intensity, and unapologetic queerness, she evokes a young Samira Wiley.

The central concept of I’m A Virgo couldn’t be more on the nose—and that’s by design. Sometimes, the obvious metaphor is the best metaphor. Cootie is the living embodiment of white society’s greatest fear: a Black man taking up space in the world, a “thug” (an epithet famously used to describe Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin) whose sheer size carries the promise of inevitable violence. And like every Black boy who’s ever fallen prey to American white supremacy—whether they’re gunned down by the police or thrown into jail or victimized by the medical system—Cootie is simply a human being, in all his beauty and imperfection.

LaFrancine and Martisse hide Cootie from the world because, like real-world Black parents, they want to protect him as long as they can from a world they know will inevitably marginalize him, fear him, and very possibly murder him. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in Between The World and Me, “In America, the injury is not being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.”

Riley’s brilliance is to create a fictional setting so over-the-top that it sneaks up on us how close it is to our own. It allows us to realize how outlandish our reality truly is—existence in an impossibly cruel, racist, classist system that is nonetheless marked by flashes of beauty and radical kindness from the very people it exploits.