Director: Boots Riley
Writer: Boots Riley
Stars: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige
Synopsis: A fearless crew of inventive young women turn shoplifting into a radical act of defiance.
Satire is a genre within the film world that can be frankly tough to truly have a firm grasp on. Sometimes they can be too on the nose in a way that never reflects a creative parallel, or maybe just never capitalizes on any meaningful commentary that brings something new to the table. In a world where many satires, in particular, and movies, in general, lack true ingenuity, it’s a true-blue miracle we have an artist like Boots Riley pushing the envelope of true bursts of never-ending imagination amidst a sea of redundancy. Riley’s debut feature, Sorry to Bother You, was merely a glimpse of the filmmaker’s willingness to delve into touchstones of clever satirization of relatable real-world struggles. I Love Boosters is a true evolution of Riley’s most unique traits. It sounds easy to say we’ve never seen satire to this degree but Riley’s ingenuity is next level, whether it’s the way he fleshes out his colorful heightened realities of slanted buildings or implementation of hallmarks like full stop-motion animation blended in with live action set pieces with so many moving cogs, I Love Boosters is a nonstop train of gleeful absurdism. He accomplishes this all while taking a proper beat down to the continuous rot plaguing our world that is capitalism. Sure, sometimes the ambition can outweigh the tools at hand, and there’s enough constantly moving plot pieces within the film’s back half that would leave most a bit confused, but I Love Boosters is more than enough proof that Boots Riley is a voice in filmmaking that is utterly transfixing in his delightful chaos, flaws in all.
I Love Boosters follows the plights of Corvette (Keke Palmer), a woman struggling to get by in a world that’s beating her down so hard she has to live in an old chicken restaurant with a literal snowball of debts and overdue bills following her everywhere she goes. Corvette leads a group of boosters known as “The Velvet Gang” that includes her, Sade (Naomi Ackie), and Mariah (Taylour Paige), who steal from big brand stores and sell their insanely expensive clothes at a discount price.
Their heists are meticulously planned out, often using exaggerated distractions like fake sicknesses and fights to often take from a top designer brand, Metro, owned by stuck-up billionaire designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore). Corvette has a complicated relationship with Christie; she wants to have a similar outsized influence, but also wants to focus on how fashion can operate as an art form, rather than just simply lifeless corporate marketing. Corvette even lands a job at one of Metro’s stores and sends in one of her personal designs but she soon realizes if she wants to make change within a deeply broken fashion industry, she must do it from the inside out. She attempts to do so through various means, including more escalating heists with a dash of Sci-Fi teleportation technology (yes, you read that right).
Even after the full off-kilter tilt within the back half of Sorry To Bother You, Riley’s full veer into doubling down on the absurdist surrealist is just as shocking. Despite similar themes, due to the new perspective of the fashion industry, there is no redundancy to be found in I Love Boosters.
Corvette is a fascinating lead character in that she is constantly mesmerized by the inner workings of the capitalist industry that surrounds the art she loves, while quite literally and physically being against everything it stands for within society. Corvette’s struggles to balance the realities of being a cog in the corporate machine vs keeping the spirit alive of what truly being an artist means in the fashion world, which takes similar themes Riley toyed with in his first feature and dials it up to an 11, and it always helps when you have a performer as spirited as Palmer to roll perfectly with the absurdities of Riley’s wavelength.
The rights of workers and solidarity amidst corporate pressure are naturally all over Riley’s latest, and it’s just so refreshing to see a film essentially scream from the rooftops for us to come together against workers’ rights being constantly exploited. If anything, Riley hits the nail on the head here even harder than he did in his dissection of these themes in Sorry To Bother You, fully exploring the abuse of workers within Chinese sweatshops under the Metro brand and how they work long hours for increasingly poor pay and labor in an environment that constantly puts them in danger of illness due to its unkempt conditions.
This perspective is delved into from the perspective of Jianhu (Poppy Liu), whose teleportation device, which was used to get to where the boosters reside in Oakland, becomes far more important in the back half of the narrative. Riley’s ultimate message is simple, yes, but powerful nonetheless. Whether it’s Violeta’s (Eiza Gonzalez) search to unionize against Metro rather than steal from them, Jianhu’s sweatshop struggles, or the Corvette’s crew’s never-ending boosting, we are all fighting the same fight against the corporate exploitation and artistic theft Christie Smith stands for that plagues both our real world and Boots Riley’s heightened dystopias. An obvious takeaway, but it’s more than clear by now that Riley is anything but subtle in the best of ways.
The technical wizardry on display throughout I Love Boosters from Riley and his team essentially feels like anything Riley couldn’t accomplish in the confines of his first feature was crammed in here. The world of the film tends to operate on a cross between fairy tale and Looney Tunes logic. Characters are often running as if they could be placed in a Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon, buildings are slanted to insane degrees, and the camera often zooms in and out like you’re on a next-level acid trip.
The gonzo nature of Riley’s sensibilities never tries too hard to get you to be reactive, though, fully embracing the silliness sometimes, using simple, well-told jokes or situational comedy surrounding its colorful cast of characters. In the film’s third act we even straight up move into the car and foot chases that implement miniatures, and stop-motion characters fully interacting with our main cast. The practicality of nearly every crevice of the film’s craft and production design makes for a truly delightful viewing experience even when the movie gets a bit too high on its own supply surrounding the Sci-Fi mumbo jumbo of its teleportation device and outlandish side characters considering its stretched runtime.
Whether you’re tapped into his deranged wavelength or not, there’s simply no one executing the perfect surrealist dystopian satire like Boots Riley, and I Love Boosters is the most uniform project of all of his best quirks, combining sugar rush heightened absurdity with powerfully implemented social commentary. Sometimes things get a bit too crazy for the film’s own good, but anytime the movie feels lost within its own mess, Riley dumps another bucket of paint on the canvas to create the type of delightful, distinctive experience that will always be more intoxicating than it is exhausting, and props to him for his continued ingenuity within a world of so many unique creators.
