The premise behind Oakland filmmaker and rapper Boots Riley’s new Prime Video series “I’m a Virgo” is brilliant: What happens when a 13-foot-tall Black teenage boy begins to roam around the East Bay?

The allegory is obvious. Black teenage boys are already targets in a world that is not made for them, and the sheer size of Cootie (Emmy winner Jharrel Jerome of“Moonlight”and“Concrete Cowboy”) guarantees he will be the focus of competing agendas. Depending on who you hang with, Cootie is either a folk hero or a direct threat.

In a sense, he’s the reverse of the title character in the 1957 science fiction classic “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” in which a victim of atomic radiation is overwhelmed by a world where technology and suspicion threatens humanity.

Unfortunately, while “I’m a Virgo” is packed with ideas, few are satisfactorily explored in the seven-episode first season, which, although set in Riley’s hometown of Oakland, is mostly filmed in New Orleans.

The first four of the roughly half-hour episodes made their world premiere in March at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, andclosed the San Francisco International Film Festival in April,both to enthusiastic audiences. The first three episodes are the strongest, but the series begins grinding gears in episode four.

The series, Riley’s first narrative work since the 2018 movie“Sorry to Bother You,”opens with 15-year-old Cootie living a sheltered life with his Aunt Lafrancine (Carmen Ejogo of“The Crowded Room”) and Uncle Martisse (Mike Epps), having never been outside the property of his fenced-in Oakland home. What he knows of society is only through reality television and commercials, like Peter Sellers’ gardener Chance in “Being There.”

当他走出第一次他has a craving for a Bing Bang Burger; he orders five at a time and eventually asks out the pretty girl behind the counter, the only one that treats him like a normal person. She is Flora (Olivia Washington, known for her roles in “The Butler” and “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” in which she starred with her father Denzel Washington), who seems to have developmental issues of her own: She often inexplicably moves fast, likethe Flash, even during one of the most bizarre sex scenes ever filmed.

Cootie is targeted by police when he gets involved in a peaceful protest, and becomes a national media sensation when cell phone footage of the giant boy is posted to social media. Sports leagues, threatened by his potential dominance, institute height restrictions to keep him from playing.

Where “I’m a Virgo” goes wrong is when Riley, in a hurry to check off every way he feels the country is repressing Black communities, takes shortcuts to his storytelling. Instead of organically weaving in a storyline to address these issues, Riley pauses the action and has a character, Jones (Kara Young), look directly into the camera and lecture the audience on how institutions — including banks and financial institutions — have actively discriminated against the Black community.

There is also the murky, insanely rich white comic book author and philanthropist (Walton Goggins) who creates a superhero called simply “the Hero,” then becomes the superhero in real life. But this hero seeks to suppress Black culture and favors the heavily coded phrase “law and order.”

Although the Hero suggests that Black people are also suppressed by consumerism and popular culture, it’s such a bizarre and distracting character that it undercuts Cootie’s story. There is even, nonsensically, a whole later episode that is devoted to the Hero, with Cootie barely making an appearance.

No one can accuse Riley of failing to swing for the fences. For all its missteps, “I’m a Virgo” is a striking visual experiment, with a sweet central performance from Jerome. Perhaps a season or two can more satisfactorily explore the many issues on the mind of its creator.

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @BRFilmsAllen