If this is your first with Boots Riley picture, be prepared for a cinematic experience you won’t forget. The director of Sorry to Bother You and the creator of I’m a Virgo, takes you on another surreal cinematic odyssey that is bursting with colour and a political commentary. It’s a capital F-you to capitalism. Although I Love Boosters sometimes overstimulates, it is undeniably entertaining as we follow a group of boosters (shoplifters) taking aim at a cutthroat fashion maven who sells fast fashion at the price of haute couture in San Francisco.
Like Riley’s previous works, every frame explodes with personality. The costume design is elaborate, eccentric and undeniably the work of an auteur. The visual design features bold colour grading in which a single vivid hue dominates the frame. The production design is offbeat and surreal. Riley doesn’t just build a world–he immerses viewers in it, as I Love Boosters is a visual feast.
And it is not just the crafts that makes this film pop. Riley’s directorial fingerprints are all over this film as he leans hard into maximalism and hyper-stylization. The direction, editing, score, and cinematography all further Riley’s fever dream aesthetic. Furthermore, instead of using CGI, Riley goes old school as he embraces miniatures and claymation for action pieces and characters. And while you can tell they are miniatures, that is part of the film’s charm as it further adds to the abstract, fever dream texture.
As with Riley’s previous work, I Love Boosters is loaded with political commentary that is loud, messy, and impossible to ignore. Corvette (Keke Palmer, Nope) is a hustling booster who dreams of building her own fashion label. However, she is constantly looking over her shoulder as a giant ball filled with bills and trauma follows her every move. She has found herself squatting in an abandoned restaurant with Mariah (Taylour Paige, Zola) and Sade (Naomi Ackie, Mickey 17) making a living off of boosting and being an underpaid retail employee for Metro.
Metro is run by Christie Smith (Demi Moore, The Substance), a gloriously cutthroat Devil Wears Prada-style boss who wears her exploitative edge like a badge of honour. She underpays her employees. She forces her salespeople to wear her clothing, even though they can’t afford it. All the while, she pumps out fast fashion from dangerous sweatshops but sells it as top of the line garments. Corvette and her crew, along with their fellow workers, want to take Christie down for good.
But the question remains: How do they take her down? Outside of boosting a couple of Metro stores and flirting with the idea of unionizing, they are completely lost. But this is Boots Riley we are talking about, so the film doesn’t stay grounded for long as he takes some surreal swings that audiences won’t see coming. It’s blunt, anti-capitalist commentary, but told in a manner in which Riley excels. Sure, not all of it lands and the story gets swallowed by Riley’s stylistic impulse, but the sheer audacity of it all is hard to deny. And with a cast this charismatic, the film is still incredibly entertaining even when it is at its most chaotic.
Funny, charming, and genuinely laugh-out-loud, I Love Boosters is a hell of a good time. Sure it is messy, a bit overstuffed, and occasionally buckles under the weight of its own ambition, but that is part of the film’s charm. Riley consistently swings for the fences and refuses to sand down his edges. And even when it doesn’t fully come together, there is enough energy, humour and sheer personality to carry it through.
