‘I Love Boosters’ Review: Boots Riley’s Exhaustingly Surreal Anti-Capitalist Satire

If writer-director Boots Riley found a sweet spot for his peculiar, at times contradictory, blend of free-associative surrealism and didactic social satire, it was his 2023 miniseries I’m a Virgo. While it lacked the cultural cool and shock value of his debut film, Sorry to Bother You, the scattershot stream of characters, tones, allegories, and stylistic flights of fancy that define Riley’s maximalist filmmaking felt truly alive across scenes where characters were simply hanging out. When the series eventually succumbed to hectic, rushed plotting and Marxist Theory 101 explainers that hijacked proper character development, the flaws were easier to forgive given how the characters and milieu were so vibrantly established.

I Love Boosters, Riley’s sophomore feature, both doubles down on his weaknesses and showcases fewer of his strengths. Arrhythmic, unfocused, and forgetting to breathe, this overstuffed film feels like a circus act, a well-dressed elephant on a unicycle juggling a dozen balls. It’s an impressive feat of dexterity, if not grace.

The film’s concept is promising: Corvette (Keke Palmer) and her sassy, broke cohorts, Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), are “boosters,” shoplifting items from boutique stores to sell at discounted prices on the street. (They refer to their business as “Triple F”: “Fashion Forward Filanthropy.”) While her friends are happy just to turn a profit and score some fancy clothes off their fashionista Robin Hood shenanigans, Corvette privately longs to be a designer, not just a consumer, and idolizes superstar Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a designer, C.E.O., STEM prodigy, and democratic think tank consultant.

The Triple F girls plot a string of heists, all of which play out with a cartoon logic, against the Christie Smith empire that involve working on the inside—where every retail location is dedicated to a single color. Corvette is, then, set on a collision course with her greatest hero and greatest enemy, which will probe the vast gulf in power and opportunity between a fêted white “creative genius” (Corvette’s words) and a “low-class urban bitch” (Christie’s).

This might have made a compelling narrative if Riley were able to stay focused on it. There’s always a sense that he couldn’t bear to leave anything on the cutting-room floor, resulting in I Love Boosters feeling as if it’s making itself up as it goes along. LaKeith Stanfield weaves in and out, seemingly at random, as a breathy, moist-eyed seducer with an outrageous European accent, and who may or may not be a vampire. And Don Cheadle pops in as a dubiously credentialed “doctor” hawking a pyramid scheme to down-and-out Oaklanders.

About halfway through, an entirely new protagonist is introduced: Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a Chinese factory laborer leading a workers’ rebellion against Smith’s exploitative manufacturing practices. She brings with her a literal plot device, a life-preserver-shaped teleporter developed by Chinese scientists and powered by “dialectical materialism”—so we’re informed by another late-coming side character (Eiza González), vaping furiously between lines of Marx-flavored technobabble, who then proceeds to explain additional functions and rules of the device for the remainder of the film. (It can also “accelerate the contradictions” of or “deconstruct” whatever it’s pointed at, transmogrifying people and objects to confoundingly inconsistent results.)

The resolution to the story’s myriad conflicts is questionably tied to the central characters’ arcs, and feels glibly reductive and utopian. Rather than enhance the film’s hysterical vision of class warfare and American life in general, the grab bag of story threads and scene ideas steal air and comprehension from one another. The main villain, for one, is well established early on (with one of many visually striking sets in her private loft, a chic postmodern all-American take on the Leaning Tower of Pisa), then kept off screen and away from the protagonists for so long that, when she reappears, it feels like a reminder of a different movie.

Attempts to squeeze pathos out of Corvette’s relationships with her friends ring hollow, because we’ve barely had time to hang out with them. None of the supporting characters are fleshed out either; they’re, at best, mouthpieces for Riley’s semi-coherent ideas about art and capital (“The people don’t want to be art, they want to be artists!”). A few scenes indulging Riley’s passion for genre include some inspired, and gooey, practical effects work and stop-motion animation, but the pleasure soon fades as they’re swept up in the sheer chaos of the film’s structure and editing. I Love Boosters is a proud, loud mess of contradictions that checks trendy ideological and aesthetic boxes without putting in the narrative work.