Infectious cartoon communism runs rampant in I Love Boosters
In Boots Riley's colorful world, shoplifting can spark an absurd revolution.
Photo: Neon
In The Coup track “5 Million Ways To Kill A C.E.O.” —a song from the 2001 album Party Music, which originally featured an image of Boots Riley blowing up the Twin Towers on the cover…until 9/11 happened later that year—Riley explains, among the more irreverently detailed ways of taking out a corporate executive, that “you can do it funk or do it disco.” In the 25 years since, Riley has moved his playful leftist militancy to the bigger and broader sandbox of cinema, and his flashy blend of imagination and idealism can maybe best be described as “doing it disco.” Shifting Sorry To Bother You‘s enjoyably bizarre sci-fi vision of telemarketing to the garment industry—a perfectly representative capitalist pipeline of exploitative manufacturing and predatory marketing—I Love Boosters paints another winning amusement park ride in the bright colors of its filmmaker’s politics.
The underpaid and overworked Oaklanders enacting Riley’s schemes in his sophomore film are this time led by Corvette (Keke Palmer), who runs a squad of boosters who raid designer boutiques and flip the duds at a discount. She’s aided by the practical Sade (Naomi Ackie) and more whimsical Mariah (Taylour Paige), running their small-scale operation across the Bay Area using a crappy van, a variety of incredible maximalist outfits, an unstoppable boldness, and the predictable racism of suspicious retail workers. As far as scrappy little strings of heists go, their spree goes well enough, robbing a series of high-fashion stores whose overpriced goods come in exactly one blinding color per location. The result, like much of the film, isn’t kaleidoscopic, but fancifully targeted—it’s like Riley’s design team shot light at a prism, then separated each brilliant wavelength into its own individual sequence.
The only problem is that all these monochromatic stores belong to Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a hilariously villainous designer-mogul equipped with an Andy Warhol hairdo and the kind of empty, provocative pseudo-intellectualism running rampant among the 1%. Smith is just vengeful enough that her petty rage and the leads’ petty crimes collide, with a wild mid-movie pivot throwing some sci-fi gas on the flames.
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