Riley, who made Sorry to Bother You out of Oakland in 2018 — a film that used telemarketing call centers and horse-headed alt-capitalism as its vehicle — is back with something that people who've seen early screenings describe as carrying the kind of insider-coded specificity that doesn't translate cleanly into a logline. "A fantastic take on the Bay Area with lots of context that only people who live here will recognize," one early viewer wrote, with the slight smugness that phrase always carries and probably earns.

The pitch is characteristically Riley: go see the movie, and also, while you're at it, please consider joining the revolution. He has always treated the two activities — cultural consumption and collective organizing — as a single motion rather than sequential steps, which is either the thing you love about him or the thing that makes you suspicious he's asking too much of a Tuesday night.

For viewers who came to him through Sorry to Bother You, this one lands as a continuation of a project, not a departure. The Bay Area he films is not the one in the tourism brochures: it's workplaces and hustle and the specific grammar of getting over.

The film opens wide May 22. What you'd notice after, walking out of wherever you saw it, is that the conversation in the lobby tends to stay inside the theater longer than usual — people standing near the exit, not quite ready to go back outside.