By John Corrado
I Love Boosters, musician turned writer-director Boots Riley’s followup to his 2018 film Sorry to Bother You, is another “surrealist critique of capitalism” that only cost $20 million to produce, and has all the subtlety or nuance of a sledgehammer. We are left with a film that is candy-coloured and, well, kind of a mess.
The title of the film refers to the practise of “boosting,” which is stealing luxury items and reselling them for cheap on the black market. The titular boosters are a group of women in the San Francisco Bay Area who dub themselves The Velvet Gang.
There’s Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie), Mariah (Taylour Paige), and new recruits Violeta (Eiza González) and Jianhu (Poppy Liu). Despite engaging in what they call “fashion forward philanthropy” – or “Triple F,” insert eyeroll emoji – these are no Jean Valjean’s. Their shoplifting is less about survival, and more about getting revenge on fashion designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), for not giving credit to aspiring fashion designer Corvette for one of her designs.
The film basically follows them as they steal clothes from high-end fashion stores. The characters are all one-note if not outright cartoony. Will Poulter appears in a comic supporting role as a flamboyant store manager, and Sorry to Bother You star LaKeith Stanfield shows up in a bizarre role that feels like it’s out of a different movie. There is little coherence to any of this, even by its own internal logic; the film basically doesn’t have any. Portals? Sure, why not, it’s needed as a plot device.
Riley is a filmmaker who seems content trying to “shock” audiences with absurdist, unpredictable comic moments instead of crafting something that has any real dramatic weight to it. But it means that any hints of actual commentary on worker’s rights and exploitation in the fashion industry gets buried in a nonsensical film that leans heavily towards being overtly goofy, and overstays its welcome at nearly two hours. There’s also nothing that’s even as shocking here as the most WTF moments in Riley’s own Sorry to Bother You.
There is no emotional connection to the characters underpinning any of this, and nothing for us to grasp onto. When you look at a filmmaker like Wes Anderson, whose own late-career work often gets unfairly reduced to the visual aesthetics that are a hallmark of his style, there is always a deeper emotional hook that keeps it grounded, even in its own heightened reality. With I Love Boosters, Riley is simply throwing colours and things at the wall to see what sticks, and it gets exhausting by the end of it.
As much as Riley is trying to up the ante from his previous film, he is also clearly emboldened by maximalist filmmaking like Everything Everywhere All At Once, which, again, at least had sympathetic characters and a bittersweet through-line to ground the over-the-top touches and extreme visual style. Any flashes of amusement or hints of creativity here, including a few uses of stop-motion and some inventive costume designs, simply get buried in the onslaught.
Riley’s filmmaking gives off an air of smugness as he beats us over the head with his simplistic, anti-capitalist messaging; the film’s neo-Marxist politics can basically be distilled down to “shoplifting is good, akshually.” But it will surely be rejected by the actual proletariat just looking to have a good time at the movies, only appealing to the radicalized, upper-class university students already converted to its broad, theoretical themes of class struggle.
On that note, in the Q&A after the film at the Toronto screening I attended, Boots Riley went long extolling the apparent virtues of Marxism, before begging the audience to go see the film again on opening weekend and bring friends so that it makes lots of money. Suggesting that, by his own admission, even he deep down understands the importance of the free market.
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