‘I Love Boosters’ Is a Likable Mess With Lots to Say

The premise of I Love Boosters, or at least the part you’ll get from the trailer, is that of a simple heist comedy. Corvette (Keke Palmer) leads the wonderfully dressed Velvet Gang, including her best friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) as they shoplift to the extreme so they can resell to the community. Seeing her stuff repeatedly stolen, obviously, drives famed designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore) mad — drama and comedy would seem to ensue. But the movie goes to far more bizarre and imaginative places, and it’s got a rich history behind it, too. Writer/director Boots Riley, who also leads insurgent rap group The Coup, is the reason for both.

I Love Boosters ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Boots Riley
Written by: Boots Riley
Starring: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza Gonzalez, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, Demi Moore
Running time: 113 mins

Twenty years after The Coup’s Pick a Bigger Weapon album, Riley deserves plaudits for even getting I Love Boosters made. Surely one of the least-likely $20M budgets ever greenlit in Hollywood, it’s named for a song on the 2006 album with the same title, a celebration of inner-city Robin Hoods of fashion, or as the tune explains: “A booster is a person who jacks from the retail / And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale.” Later on, it continues: “The next time you see two women running out the Gap / With arms full of clothes still strapped to the rack / Once they jump in the car, hit the gas and scat / If you have to say something, just stand and clap.”

While this does read in retrospect like an entertaining premise for a film, it is somewhat sparse. And trusting Riley — one of the least profitable rappers of all-time — with a tens of millions of dollars is a surprise considering his career-long, self-identified communism in perhaps the most openly capitalistic musical genre.

Another surprise was Riley’s 2018’s Sorry to Bother You, also named after a previous album by The Coup. His debut as a screenwriter/director successfully managed to corral a big-name cast (LaKeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, David Cross, Danny Glover, then-flourishing Armie Hammer, Steven Yeun) and turn a modest box-office success. Not only that, it was a brightly colored, aesthetically distinct fable that brought Riley’s anti-capitalist ethos to the big screen in an unlikely comedy that perhaps wasn’t much different from The Coup’s music until it took a wildly sci-fi left turn in the final act.

With its follow-up, I Love Boosters, Riley truly cements a career like no one else’s. His new film is unlikely to make a fraction of Sorry to Bother You’s profits despite sharing its penchant for eye-popping visuals and another impressive ensemble. Riley’s plotting can be as convoluted as Spike Lee’s in trying to get his message out — remember Lee’s grand denouement in Bamboozled where one character held another at gunpoint to force them to watch (and understand the offense of) old blackface and minstrelsy films? Riley’s script forces a lot of rapid-fire dialectical materialist theory into the mouth of Eiza Gonzalez’s supporting character Violeta in particular, telling-not-showing so much so quickly that it’s literally hard to hear everything fast enough to process where the plot is going — especially when it once again deploys sci-fi elements halfway through.

As with Sorry to Bother You, the increasingly entangled trajectory is deployed to mundane ends — the fantasy of improving job conditions for the working class. It’s a simple shoplifting comedy until the teleportation devices and people wearing skinsuits show up. To confuse the proceedings further, LaKeith Stanfield plays a mysterious character who’s got Prince’s stare along with other features that, let us say, are not of this earth.

There are too many threads and allusions: a physical, giant garbage ball of eviction notices and other anxiety-inducing financial documents follows Corvette around. A couple quick moments devoted to a rift in Corvette and Sade’s friendship feel out of place. We never learn about the origins of the Gang or much about their individual personalities, but we get a whole history of Jianhu (Poppy Liu) in the second act, whose family has suffered death and disease from working in one of Smith’s Chinese factories. Ambitious visual sequences employ miniatures and stop-motion teams, including an obligatory chase scene that feels deeply obligatory and wastes a promising Eric Andre cameo. And even the regular, stage-setting dialogue at the film’s start begins as a standard heist comedy but gets somewhat lost in the proceedings. The satire isn’t ineffective per se, but having Demi’s Christie call the Gang bitches at every turn simply cries out for writing that’s as fresh, original, and compelling as the visuals.

The reason I Love Boosters rises to become at all worthy of recommendation is because the design team’s imaginations really do paint a vivid picture. Riley has made a film that looks spectacular and matches the candy-colored fashions whose industry it means to lampoon. Each individual in the Velvet Gang dons an even more psychedelic getup with each successive scene. The costuming department will earn nominations for awards they deserve. The visual gags are unpredictable, plentiful, and nuts: from the sheer quantity of thieved clothing the girls managed to stuff under their outfits to the design of Smith’s office, an angular-artist caricature whose floor is on an incline, causing inhabitants to slide down the slope. And the overall spirit of this movie based on an obscure, two-decades-old song is timely as ever: a goofy caper that indulges random sequences of sex-comedy and action to get its wordy message delivered.

If there’s any hope to teach the masses about dialectical materialism, it’s through Riley’s lens.