The imaginative Boots Riley has made a name for himself as a director and writer willing to forgo realism in favor of bright color schemes and fantastical creatures to bring his social commentaries to life. While I Love Boosters has Riley’s usual directorial hallmarks, it gets too lost in its own colorful sauce to say anything very compelling or meaningful.
I Love Boosters follows Keke Palmer as Corvette, a fashionable professional shoplifter desperate for a chance to get into the fashion industry. Living in the Bay Area, she and her stylish friends and fellow boosters have built a steady income by shoplifting from high-end designers and reselling the clothes on the street for much less. One of their regular targets, high-end designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), is intent on identifying these boosters and getting revenge. As the “Velvet Gang” tries to evade detection, their modern-day Robin Hood business begins to be overshadowed by larger consumerist forces, like protests against fast fashion and the Chinese sweatshops where the clothes are manufactured.
As with Riley’s debut Sorry to Bother You, I Love Boosters starts small and becomes continually grander and more encompassing. The third act takes a crazy left turn where the audience could either relinquish control and go all-in or disengage completely. Riley’s usual hallmarks of satire and social commentary are also present and most effective in the first half. We get pointed jokes about how miserable it is to work at Christie Smith’s stores, with employees using starting blocks to take their 30-second breaks, and how out-of-touch Christie herself is, lording over the city from her extremely slanted penthouse apartment, poised while her assistant wobbles around trying not to slide down towards the front door. Snippets of news interviews have funny headlines that echo those obsessed with conspiracy theories. As the story unfolds, and we start introducing timey-wimey devices like a portal/wormhole device that can not only transport clothing from Chinese warehouses but also transform matter into other objects and a random man (played by Lakeith Stanford) that may actually be a demon sucking out souls, the plot becomes too overwhelming. Suddenly, Riley is throwing everything at us from all angles, and drinking out of a visual firehose feels more messy than intentional.
That said, I Love Boosters packages all this mess in an incredibly fun aesthetic. When so many films want to embrace the dark, realistic, monotone of life, Riley has always pushed his films to be eye-popping, a feast for the eyes. This is particularly fun in the design of Smith’s stores, Metro Designer, which focuses on one color per season, plunging the clothes and their employees into a singular tone of yellow, green or blue from the clothing to the makeup to the accessories and hair styles. With a fantastical, cartoonish aura, I Love Boosters looks like unbridled imagination.
While the film is a rollercoaster of aesthetic fun, the plot and its anti-consumerism message become too unwieldy to feel satisfactory. Riley’s commitment to the visual is a breath of fresh air amongst today’s filmmakers, but there needs to be more specificity in the story to truly craft an unforgettable film.
