Boots Riley certainly has a perspective; that cannot be denied. After years making music with the groups The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club, he rocketed into the film industry with 2018’s “Sorry to Bother You,” a surreal and colorful exploration of class and wage disparity and unionization, mixed in with some of the most bizarre humor this side of Adult Swim. His follow-up, the 2023 TV series “I’m A Virgo” continued his biting perspective on modern capitalist culture, this time taking aim at the modern superhero monoculture. His sophomore film has finally hit theaters, and it's more of exactly what you’d expect from a filmmaker as specifically uncompromising as him.
“I Love Boosters” follows a group of clothes boosters (people who steal from department stores and sell the clothes at discounted prices) consisting of Corvette, played by Keke Palmer (“NOPE,” “One of Them Days”), Sade, played by Naomi Ackie (“Mickey 17,” “ I Wanna Dance With Somebody”), and Mariah, played by Taylour Paige (“Zola,” “IT: Welcome to Derry”). After Corvette discovers that a design of hers was stolen by fashion design legend and her idol Christie Smith, played by Demi Moore (“St. Elmo’s Fire,” “The Substance”), her group teams up with department store employee Violetta, played by Eiza González (“Baby Driver,” “Ambulance (2022)”), and Chinese sweatshop worker Jianhu, played by Poppy Liu (“No Good Deed,” “Hacks”), to clean out every one of her department stores in a targeted attempt to take her down.
Riley’s cast extends further than Corvette, her gang of boosters, and their target, filling out supporting roles with plenty of familiar faces. Don Cheadle (“Ocean’s 11 (2001),” “Iron Man 2”) joins as a charismatic self-help guru Dr. Jack, LaKeith Stanfield (“Sorry to Bother You,” “Judas and the Black Messiah”) shows up as a handsome love interest for Corvette known only as the “pinky ring guy,” and Will Poulter (“We’re the Millers,” “Midsommar”) steals all of his scenes as snooty department store manager Grayson. Each member of the cast gets plenty of comedic moments to shine and embrace the weirdness inherent in Riley’s style, with Palmer and Ackie getting the most of the film’s limited dramatic work.
Both are great individually and anytime they’re together. Palmer feels right at home, with the fast-paced surrealism drenched in every corner of this world fitting right into the personal style she’s curated her whole professional life. Its a real gung-ho kind of performance, as Palmer throws herself into anything and everything Riley wants to accomplish.
And he certainly wants to accomplish a lot. Riley has always been a filmmaker with a lot on his mind, and “Boosters” tackles everything from commercialized fashion and creativity to workers' unions and strikes to commercialized propaganda. There are a lot of plates spinning, and not all of them get equal attention. A handful of threads are forgotten about until the third act, giving everything a scattershot feeling. This is also wrapped into a film that is trying to make you laugh with as much weirdness as possible at every given moment. Not all of it works smoothly though. Everything starts cranked to 11, which means that the film’s baseline is already so audacious that it isn’t until the third act when things really get cranked up. It is consistently riotously funny though, plastering over the peaks and valleys of weirdness with delightful comedic bits.
The color and fashion of the world pop right off the screen to create a world that feels truly bizarrely unique. Not a moment goes by without some kind of oddball background gag or piece of production design. From monochromatic department stores to physical manifestations of debt and rent rolling around, Riley wants to make this a living, breathing world of oddities. What pushes things even further is how varied the visual elements are. Car chases are shot with miniatures, stop motion comes in heavily in the third act, and the effects have a scrappy “shot in my backyard” quality to them. It allows the film’s cartoon sensibilities to shine through far better than they ever would with a $200 million budget or clean pristine CGI. It’s a fantastic film on every visual level, and the musical score from group Tune-Yards (“Sorry to Bother You”) keeps that going. Each beat is either purely electronic or a combination of vocalizations in place of music. Think if the background music of “Seinfeld” was filtered through a 2010 8-bit converter.
If you’ve seen “Sorry To Bother You,” then you’ve likely already seen Riley’s latest act of gonzo anti-capitalist absurdity. While “I Love Boosters” doesn’t have that film’s tighter focus, it has virtually all of the other elements that make Riley’s films his own. With Palmer zeroed in on his wavelength from frame one, she leads her crew and the audience through a colorful romp of fashion and philanthropy. “Boosters” is a scattershot shotgun blast of timeliness and absurdity, but that shotgun it comes from is pastel pink, covered in fringe, and a joy to behold. 4/5
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