I Love Boosters Is A Messy, Maximalist Masterpiece

Corvette (Keke Palmer) is lonely. It’s not the kind of loneliness that can be solved with more friends or a new hobby, but the kind that stems from a cosmic kind of FOMO. The world is changing all around her, mostly for the worse, but sometimes for the better — at least when it comes to the artists shaping society. Designers like Corvette’s semi-problematic idol, Christie Smith (Demi Moore), are using fashion like a perverse form of marketing, controlling perception through color and raw material. She wants to be like that, but aside from sending one of her designs to a Bay Area competition run by Metro Designers — the fast fashion offshoot of Christie’s haute couture brand — she’s stuck on the sidelines. It doesn’t help that she’s destitute, with a mountain of overdue bills that have snowballed into the boulder from Indiana Jones, which haunts her waking moments. Corvette sees almost no way out of this suffocating debt, this quietly crippling loneliness. So she squats in an abandoned chicken shop and largely shuts herself off from the world.

But Corvette is also a booster. It’s the colloquial term for shoplifters who swipe merchandise from high-end stores and sell it to the community at a lower price. There’s a kind of punk-rock, Robin Hood quality to the practice — and, believe it or not, that’s probably the tamest aspect of Boots Riley’s sophomore film. That I Love Boosters is so phenomenally, fantastically weird should not surprise anyone tuned in to the rapper-turned-filmmaker’s frequency. His debut, Sorry to Bother You, was much the same until its insane third-act twist took things a bridge too far. His first series, I’m a Virgo, was relatively tamer, retaining a gonzo fairytale feel and kaleidoscopic visuals — but it didn’t make quite so big of a splash. There’s no chance of that happening here: Riley’s latest film is his loudest project by far, and not only because it dials the saturation to an 11. An onslaught of visual gags undercuts all that quiet, righteous fury until the two somehow become one, making this Riley’s messiest project thus far but also, without a doubt, his best.

I Love Boosters was never going to be a straightforward heist. It’s a little too in love with the idea of the heist, and all the hijinks that can ensue within one, to tell a very propulsive story, at least in its first act. Riley busies the beginning of the film with an introduction into a world so ridiculously, humorously broken that anything really goes — but the act of being led from one skit into the next trumps the need for a true plot for a long time. The zany, Looney Tunes logic of I’m a Virgo is in full force here, allowing I Love Boosters to introduce a local lothario (LaKeith Stanfield, who has never been funnier) with powers of seduction so extreme that he literally sucks the soul out of his partners, without anybody batting an eye. Palmer’s deadpan performance makes these reveals all the funnier: Corvette briefly entertains his pursuits until she hears an urban legend about his bedside manner and sighs, “Guess I gotta block him.”

Corvette bears the same indifference for the obvious pyramid scheme that’s ensnared half the community, including her best friend, Sadé (Naomi Ackie), and is run out of a used furniture store, complete with animatronic chairs that could swallow their sitters whole. (That its ringleader — Don Cheadle in a loc’d up wig and fake belly — barely looks like a real person is a clue into the film’s central conspiracy.) Things like that just happen in the Bay, even for the one-percenters. Christie’s infamous high-rise, for example, was “built wrong” and now sits at a 45-degree pitch, making her daily operations look like a night on the Titanic.

Still, it’s little more than an inconvenience for Christie, as are the heroines of this story, known as the Velvet Gang. Despite having powerful quirks of their own — Corvette’s unofficial roommate, Mariah (a fabulous Taylour Paige), holds her breath to turn light-skinned and camouflage in boutique stores — they still can’t move enough product to hit Christie where it actually hurts. There are rumblings about some expensive suits valued at over $100,000, but they’re kept under lock and key. The Velvet Gang spends a lot of time in a cycle of trial and error, chasing their big score, even getting jobs at a Metro Designers store (run by a hilariously over-it Will Poulter) with plans to somehow snatch its entire inventory.

What they spend weeks planning is accomplished in just a few minutes by Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a defector from one of Christie’s sweatshops in China. How she wound up in California has something to do with her “magic bag,” which also helps her relieve entire stores of their merchandise in a matter of moments. The gang wastes little time recruiting her, and from there the true heart of I Love Boosters — if such a thing could even be quantified — finally crystallizes. This, like all of Riley’s work, is a socialist romp about how billionaires are bad, but it’s also the filmmaker’s most tangible foray into science fiction.

The introduction of a teleportation device that is also kind of a time machine and another, secret third thing might be the weirdest MacGuffin Riley has introduced thus far, but it won’t be the last to complicate this narrative. Riley has so many ideas about this world that they overwhelm the senses, but at the end of the day, Boosters is about what all his work is about: organizing against our oppressors. Eiza González walks a similar path as Steven Yeun’s union-forming white knight in Sorry to Bother You. With bleached brows and a fierce septum piercing, her Violeta embodies the film’s punk spirit — and the need for tangible systemic change — to a T. She’s got no real problem with boosting, but she’s the only character who understands the importance of breaking Christie’s empire the “right” way. She’s also the only one who understands Jianhu’s device, evidenced by a zig-zagging exposition sequence that may leave audiences with more questions than answers... even if it does supply plenty of laughs.

Fortunately, Riley is keen to show and tell: He’s not the director you go to for subtlety, a point that should be obvious by now but remains a baffling critique. This is a director who projects a character’s backstory like a film across their exposed forehead; who skewers racial self-esteem with brazenly transgressive gags. Why should his call to arms be subtle? Why should his dystopia mince words? If Boosters had a flaw, it’s less about Riley laying it on too thick and more about the things he leaves behind to do it, like the interior lives of his heroines. Paige and Ackie don’t get much to do beyond playing up their differences against Corvette: Mariah is the airhead, while Sadé is “always” putting the score above humbling Christie. Violeta, active as she is, likewise exists solely in relation to Corvette, the political conscience she doesn’t yet have but slowly begins to develop.

Fully-realized female characters have eluded Riley’s filmography from the start, and their absence is much more pressing issue than tone or finesse. Fortunately, the conviction of this cast is enough to hold this romp together, and Riley’s bonkers spinning of plates does eventually make sense, thanks in part to a twist that tips the concept of “selling out to The Man” into a stop-motion-animated, body-swapping farce. It’s brutally dystopian and, like most parts of this film, laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Boosters made me laugh so hard I got a stitch in my side, and that’s exactly why it works, flaws and all. This feast for the eyes wants desperately to hold our gaze, if only to get its message across, even reshape society. As an exercise in radical empathy, it’s masterful — and it has the guts to look good doing it, too.

I Love Boosters premiered at SXSW on March 12. It releases in theaters on May 22.