I Love Boosters is a maximalist affair. The latest movie from Boots Riley is at once communist agitprop and also a rollicking comedy about a group of scammers in a magical realist version of the Bay Area and also a celebration of everything that cinema is and can be.
I am a bit of a cinema nerd. I studied cinema in college—both theory and production—and it was my pathway to thinking and writing about video games as art. There is simply nothing better than going to the movies and being delighted by moving images. And l Love Boosters is a testament to that delight that you can only feel when you’re watching a movie with a bunch of strangers, laughing, yelping and signing together in the dark.
Boosters is a movie about Corvette, played by Keke Palmer, a fashion designer and a member of the Velvet Gang, a group of boosters who steal designer clothes and sell them at discount prices. Her main target are the stores for Metro Designs, the flagship brand from genius designer Christine Smith, played by Demi Moore, who sees these boosters as her ultimate nemeses. But that stuffed-to-bursting premise is only the start. As far as I can tell, the aesthetic goal of I Love Boosters is to create the most movie of all time.
That means that the film is, on occasions, shaggy around the edges. After a totally coherent explanation of the theory of dialectical materialism (yes, really) in the back third of the movie, the zaniness that the movie runs on loses some steam. But the things Boots Riley shows us while zigging and zagging through the plot of the movie feels totally worth any quibbles I have about pacing. As much as I loved Riley’s first movie, Sorry To Bother You, that was very much a first film—a movie that felt like it had to contain everything that Riley thinks and believes, because he wasn’t sure there’d be a second one. While I Love Boosters rehashes some of the same ideas, it feels lighter, less burdened by being a debut. it’s that lightness that makes this movie so fun to watch.
Each Metro Designs store sells a single color of clothing, and each time the characters enter one, they’re awash in a sea of red or yellow or green. In the background of the action there’s news broadcasts of characters like “black single mother” or “upstanding citizen” who are arguing in favor of paying more rent and not unionising. Christine Smith lives in a high rise that hangs diagonally across downtown—when Corvette tries to leave it after sneaking in, sliding down the slanted floor, eventually her legs spin around like she’s Roadrunner. There's an extended stop motion sequence with characters who literally remove their own skins. Lakeith Stanfield sorrowfully intones into the camera, “no more sucking souls out of pussies.” It literally brings a tear to his eye. There’s so much movie in this movie that I forgot about the subplot where Don Cheadle plays a predatory pyramid scheme leader until I asked Chris Person to read this blog over and he mentioned it.
After the lights came back on when I saw it, my husband turned to me and said “at no point did I know where the plot was gonna go,” which to me is a sign of the film’s success in its approach to filmmaking. It’s all “yes, and” but also “more” and also “throw this in too.” Even if I don’t know that the movie coheres by the end, I love when I go to a movie theater and feel thrill and surprise. I feel like I could watch I Love Boosters a hundred times, and each time I could find something new in it. These are the kinds of movies that make me love the movies.
Chris Person
