1 of 5 | From left to right, Naomie Ackie, Taylour Paige and Keke Palmer star in “I Love Boosters,” in theaters Friday. Photo courtesy of Neon
I Love Boosters, in theaters Friday, is a surreal satire and hilarious rallying cry against capitalist inequality. Writer/director Boots Riley breaks the narrative rules with surgical expertise to push boundaries without losing the audience
Corvette (Keke Palmer) leads the Velvet Gang of boosters, shoplifters who steal couture and resell it for a fraction of the corporate take. Their main target, Metro Designers, and its CEO Christie Smith (Demi Moore), leads to metaphysical devices and biting social commentary.
Metro Designers does not only exploit the customers it overcharges for fashion. They also exploit their own staff (Eiza Gonzalez and Najah Bradley) and the workers in their Chinese factories.
The Boosters’ methods are already comical. The sight of them hobbling out of a store with their tracksuits stuffed with off the rack items is a perfectly executed sight gag.
Corvette’s accomplice Mariah (Taylour Paige) can transform when she holds her breath. She just ducks out of frame with each breath to switch actors.
Surreal elements include Corvette’s visions of a large boulder made up of all the eviction notices she’s received. Christie also works in a tilted skyscraper.
Not only is the building exterior slanted in the middle of perpendicular buildings, but her office follows the building’s slant. This requires physical comedy just to walk uphill or remain seated on a slanted bench.
The message behind the office is clear. Corporate executives tolerate blatant dysfunction and gaslight the world that there’s nothing unusual about it.
Visually, Christie styles each Metro location as a different primary color. So interiors are alternately all green or all yellow, with walls and wardrobe all coordinated.
It’s not all sight gags though. There are highbrow Godard references too.
In the background, a white commentator (Jason Ritter) on the news assures people they benefit from making less money because they are burdened with fewer responsibilities. If that logical gap isn’t obvious, those background reports later Black people shilling for the freedom to pay more for rent if they want to.
The Boosters get a chance to hit Christie harder than just in her inventory when Jianhu (Poppy Liu) shows up and beats them to a robbery. Jianhu comes from the Chinese factory where they make Metro Designer clothes under toxic sweatshop conditions.
Jianhu acquired a device from management that enables Corvette to plan an even bigger score and rebalance the power in the workers’ favor. It’s called a situational accelerator and can do multiple things. As convoluted with technobabble as it seems, Riley appears to play by the rules he established.
In bringing many of the situational accelerator effects to life, Riley opts for more classic techniques like models and stop-motion animation. It is not only refreshing, but funnier than its digital counterpart would have been.
Riley is able to maintain the narrative flow of I Love Boosters while indulging in these atypical tangents. The viewer knows the story is structurally building to a climax, but can genuinely have no idea what will happen for its resolution.
His target, corporate exploitation, is relatable. One Metro retail manager (Will Poulter) forces his salespeople to wear Metro outfits, deducted from their paychecks, and literally only gives them 30 seconds for lunch. It may be absurd but it is believable.
The Chinese manager who investigates the stolen device in the factory will sound familiar to anyone who’s been stuck in a meeting about something the authority refuses to name explicitly.
And the Godard reference is apt, because the French New Wave filmmaker also paused his art films to address the plight of exploited labor, though Riley is smoother at incorporating it into the plot.
The social issues, from Corvette’s pseudo-Robin Hood crusade to Jianhu taking the fight to the executives, are scathing, yet the story remains captivating. I Love Boosters has something to say and won’t let traditional narrative molds contain it.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
