Director Boots Riley makes films that make me literally bark with laughter. His mixture of audacity and absurdism hits my funny bone in a way many other comedies do not. In 2018 Riley's first film Sorry to Bother You came out and it was unlike anything I've seen before. Riley's films are satires poking fun at capitalism and racism in ways that would feel ridiculously on the nose coming from any other filmmaker, but in Riley's capable hands the over-the-top elements work perfectly.
Riley is back with another satire of capitalism, I Love Boosters. Boosters are people who steal from retail stores and sell the lifted wares at a discounted prices. Corvette (Keke Palmer) is our main character and is part of a group called the "Velvet Gang" alongside Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige). They primarily lift from Metro Designers stores, which are run by Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a fashion designer whom Corvette--a budding designer herself--has admiration for (despite Smith being a horrible person).
The first third or so of I Love Boosters is pretty straightforward, with the Velvet Gang hatching a plan to get jobs at Metro Designers so they can loot the store of its inventory. The absurdist elements are in visual gags and corporate speak. However, an insane twist occurs at this point which sends the film into a whole new realm of absurdity (and science-fiction). So stop reading here if you want to be surprised!
*spoilers ahead*
Jianhu's family works at a sweatshop in China where all the Metro Designers clothes are made and they're paid shit wages and work in conditions that make them sick and even give them cancer. Jianhu and her cousin, Li Pan (Alan Z), discover that the sweatshop is experimenting with teleporters to cut down on shipping costs. They steal the teleporters and hatch a plan for Jianhu to go to the United States and teleport all the Metro Designers clothes back to China and hold the clothes until Christie Smith meets the workers' demands.
So the Velvet Gang and Jianhu team up, but for different reasons: Jianhu wants to help her family, Corvette wants to get back at Christie Smith for stealing one of Corvette's designs, and Sade just wants to keep selling the boosted clothes at a discounted price. Meanwhile, a coworker from Metro Designers, Violeta (Eiza Conzalez), keeps trying to get the gang to join her union efforts. The bigger message the film is trying to convey is that even when we have different reasons for fighting "the Man", we are more powerful together than we are separately.
I Love Boosters is so packed, visually and thematically, that I have only scratched the surface on explaining the plot. If the film has a weakness it's that there is so much going on, especially in the final third of the movie, that it begins to feel incoherent. However, that's just how Boots Riley does things. The film is maximalist, with shit shoved into every corner of every frame and insane ideas bursting out like a snake bursting out of a can of mixed nuts.
And I haven't even mentioned LaKeith Stanfield's role as a demon who sucks people's souls out while going down on them!
In any case, I'm not going to run through the entire plot because we'd be here all night. I Love Boosters ends on a wildly optimistic note that will hit differently for different people. Some people see it as just another element of absurdism: the idea that everything can work out in the end is absurd! Others will perhaps see it as bad writing or a cop-out.
I see the ending as one of many elements that makes I Love Boosters a very feminist/womanist film. Not only are all the main characters women (and most of them women of color), but I Love Boosters has this vibe of community, humor, joy, and care that feels very female activism coded. Something that really struck me is that when Christie Smith is defeated, nothing bad or violent happens to her. She just walks away, weary at the fact that she is forced to meet the workers' demands. This isn't a film about revenge and punishment (two things that play right back into individualism, capitalism, racism, and misogyny), it's about coming together as a group to care for one's community. Something horrific happening to Christie wouldn't have fit the overall tone of the movie which is playful and humorous. Even though the film is directed by a man, it felt more feminist to me than a lot of other social-political satires. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass, but that's the feeling I was left with after the film was over.
I Love Boosters is great fun and will reward multiple viewings since it is stuffed full of eye-popping colors and visual gags.
Grade: A
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