Nobody makes movies like Boots Riley, case file no. 2: I Love Boosters (now on VOD platforms like Prime Video). The firebrand filmmaker follows up his lunatic satire Sorry to Bother You with an even wilder, wackier film, starring Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige as career shoplifters who steal expensive clothes and sell ’em cheap as a form of socioeconomic protest, and a way to scrape by in a late-capitalist world. Boosters is defined by its unpredictable nature, from its full-gonzo visual style to its hard lefts into surrealist sci-fi — and if its shotgun-blast approach means it doesn’t quite hang together, at the very least it gives us a whole bunch of insane stuff we’ve never seen before.
The Gist: Oakland. We meet Corvette (Palmer) at a party, and, yes, her name is Corvette. What, should it be something more conventional, like Perfidia Beverly Hills? Anyway, Corvette sidles up to a tall handsome man, dances with him and seductively asks him his shoe size. It’s a 12. Oh boy. You know what they say about a man with big feet. So she invites him to her apartment and does what anyone would do with a man and his size 12s: try to sell him some fancy-ass shoes. She’s got a whole bunch of designer rags and accessories in there, all liberated from high-end stores so she can move them at a gross discount and earn a living. It ain’t much of a living. She and her bestie/fellow criminal conspirator Mariah (Paige) squat in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant, where any attempt to get rid of the greasy smell is a wasted effort.
Corvette, Mariah, and their partner Sade (Ackie) have engineered enough smash-and-grabs and stuff-it-in-their-pants capers to capture the attention of Christie Smith (Demi Moore), the quillionaire fashion mogul whose Metro Designers stores the thieving trio targets. It’s a complicated situation for Corvette, a wannabe designer who both idolizes and despises Christie. She’s thrilled that the rich and famous woman has dubbed them The Velvet Gang, going so far as to go on TV and call them “low-class urban bitches — with all due respect to urban bitches,” that addendum tacked on because her target demographic is “urban bitches.” When Corvette catches wind that Christie is about to receive a shipment of $100,000 suits, the Gang plans a heist. Consider the stakes raised.
From there, the Gang secures jobs at a Metro Designers store, which only sells clothing of one color, green, until it changes to yellow, managed by a condescending doofus (Will Poulter, being positively Poulteresque) whose hair color changes to match the styles. They gather allies: Disgruntled Metro clerk Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez); the seductive Pinky Ring Guy (Lakeith Stanfield), secretly a literal soul-sucking demon; maybe pyramid-scheme low-end wannabe-TED-talker Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle, unrecognizable beneath prosthetics); and definitely Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a disgruntled worker at one of Metro Designers’ Chinese sweatshops who shows up with a teleporter device that’s also a “situational accelerator” and deconstructor, all functioning in accordance to the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism. Told you this movie was batshit. Which is to say it definitely gets crazier before it gets less crazy.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Boosters mooshes together Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Bling Ring with bits of The Substance and maybe even Mad God, with some Bong Joon-ho (think Parasite) and Looney Tunes thrown in, all inspired by Tout Va Bien, the class-struggle drama by Jean Luc Godard, who’s very nearly on-the-nose namedropped in the movie.
Performance Worth Watching: More leading roles in comedies for Palmer, please. In this and One of Them Days, she’s exhibited a buoyant, ebullient comic tone that’s as funny as it is earnest.
Sex And Skin: Some fairly graphic, more-comedic-and/or-weird-than-sexy instances of sex-having.
Our Take: Deep into Boosters’ third act, Corvette exclaims, “Now is not the time for nuance, Sade!”, an exhortation that seems like a core component of the film’s thesis statement. In an early scene, Palmer struts around in what looks like an improvised mascot costume, Corvette having stuffed so much contraband clothing in her pants and jacket, the seams are about to burst, an apt visual metaphor for the film’s thematics: No more room. Overstuffed. But while her outfit holds together, the film itself explodes, scattering its many ideas hither and yon. There’s no room for subtext when you leave behind a massive smoldering crater.
And that crater is home to a vitriolic skewering of capitalism: The rich exploiting the poor, engaging in conspiracy — and lunacy — to maintain power. There’s no ignoring the obvious non-implications of a white woman in a literally crooked skyscraper — no, really, it leans so far to the right, she tells her personal barista to engage her core in order to get up the slope — calling Black women “urban bitches” while at the same time employing them and selling them goods she’s convinced them they need in order to be fashionable. It’s the pie-in-the-face approach to communicating theme.
But that’s what happens when a filmmaker is given creative control and the freedom to be uninhibited. Which is to say, don’t you dare criticize I Love Boosters for being wholly Riley’s vision, from the jokes to the inspired costume design and art direction. I could fault the film for its off-tempo pacing, for prompting us to try to make sense of the Stanfield character and its purpose, for brushing away notions of focus and coherence like pesky flies at a backyard barbecue. Riley stitches together madcap action-comedy, crime-caper fodder, surreal sci-fi, political satire, and other weird-for-its-own-sake miscellania (he indulges stop-motion animation and other textures, and borderline-circus music on the score for the sake of enhancing the overall absurdity of the endeavor) into a movie that’s as entertaining as it is confounding, his goal being, I assume, to lead us to a place where provocation and laughter coexist. This is undoubtedly a Boots Riley film, and there are few directors so distinct to warrant such recognition.
Our Call: All that said, smoking a doob might enhance your experience of I Love Boosters. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
