THE STORY – A crew of professional shoplifters known as The Velvet Gang take aim at a cutthroat fashion maven.
THE CAST – Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter & Demi Moore
THE TEAM – Boots Riley (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 105 Minutes
Truly original voices are rare in Hollywood. Plenty of people have original ideas, but many have so many that they make a whole movie feel original, let alone more than one. Boots Riley is a genuine original. His debut feature, 2018’s “Sorry to Bother You,” keeps getting weirder as it goes, with crazy new elements being added regularly until it no longer resembles anything remotely familiar. His sophomore feature, “I Love Boosters,” goes even further. While it starts in a world that seems only a step or two away from our own, it eventually reveals itself to be set in a completely alternate universe, complete with fantastical technology and other wild elements that are far too surprising to spoil. It’s a big, bold swing of a movie, with a wild plot and even wilder stylistic swings. It’s also a thrillingly contemporary satire of our current moment, turning our collective economic stress into absurdist cinematic gold.
Corvette (Kiki Palmer) wants to be a fashion designer like her idol, Christie Smith (Demi Moore). However, she has no qualms about being a booster, stealing clothing from the monochromatic Metro Designers stores that carry Christie’s wildly overpriced clothes and selling them at steep discounts. After all, she’s squatting in an abandoned chicken restaurant since she can’t afford a place of her own. When Corvette learns that Christie stole a design she submitted to a contest run by Christie’s fashion company, it’s on. She and her fellow boosters, best friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), get hired at Metro Designers and hatch a scheme to rob the store clean, only someone beats them to it while they’re in a quick staff meeting. They eventually discover the shoplifter: Jianpu (Poppy Liu), who works alongside her family in China making Christie’s clothes in a factory that is sickening its workers with sandblasting jeans. But how did she get to the US? And how did she steal a whole store’s worth of clothing so quickly?
If you’ve seen Riley’s other work, then you’ll know that the answers to those questions will not only be weird, but lead down rabbit holes to even weirder things, and on that front, “I Love Boosters” makes “Sorry to Bother You” look like child’s play. Riley has an endlessly creative mind, and he goes in a hard sci-fi direction here that is all the more effective for the extremely casual way the movie explains this complicated piece of technology. Riley simultaneously trusts the audience to understand what’s going to happen when the girls use the technology, and knows that it really doesn’t matter, because the images and ideas he has in his head are so out-there that there’s no way anybody else could imagine them. Even while watching, it only feels like it makes half-sense, but the absurdist realm Riley works in is all about playing with incongruities and dream-like, surrealist imagery. It doesn’t have to make sense in order to “make sense,” because it’s all about the feelings those images provoke.
And Riley’s images are quite provocative indeed. Working with the great cinematographer Natasha Braier, talented production designer Christopher Glass (“The Jungle Book“), and genius costumer Shirley Kurata (“Everything Everywhere All At Once“), Riley has created an intoxicatingly good-looking movie. The vivid colors explode off the screen, and the designs themselves are eye-popping. The stylish miniatures add a tremendous sense of fun, and the visual effects have real personality. Christie lives in a building that’s steeper than the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and a scene involving a coffee cart brought into her apartment leads to a piece of physical comedy worthy of the great silent comedians. It shouldn’t work, but it does despite itself, with obvious visual effects and all. The film’s wacky tone is heightened by the insane score from Tune-Yards, an invigoratingly odd mix of jazzy marching band and electronic squelches bouncing off each other like electrons throwing off sparks.
The ensemble cast throws off plenty of sparks of their own, too. The ultra-charismatic Palmer makes for an endearing lead, and her fellow boosters Ackie, Paige, and Liu match her beat for beat with razor-sharp comic timing. Moore has a blast playing a thinly-disguised Anna Wintour type, monologuing endlessly about the importance of her art and how her fashion will change the world. Eiza González’s stoner Metro Designers employee offers a laidback contrast to the more energetic performances around her, notably Will Poulter’s hilariously uptight store manager. LaKeith Stanfield’s supporting role is a highlight as a love interest for Corvette, who’s so hot the film starts warping around him. An unrecognizable Don Cheadle shows up for one big, hilarious scene as a community member running a very literal pyramid scheme. While everyone brings their own unique energy to the film, they’re all working in the same heightened tonal register, matched by the film’s highly stylized visuals.
An unapologetically political filmmaker, Riley goes for the jugular with his blunt force satire. Thankfully, he’s also scalpel sharp where he has to be. A running joke of community members being interviewed on the news expressing opinions that run counter to what you’d expect – wanting to pay higher rent and work longer hours, for example – hits harder each time it shows up, culminating in a hilariously unexpected gag that is both hilarious and frightening in its relevance to the real world. Riley throws a lot at the audience, and a surprising amount of it sticks, because of just how memorably bonkers it is. Riley overexplains some things to ensure the audience follows the hairpin turns of his overly creative mind, but always does so in an entertaining way. His confidence as a director results in some big swings that may not connect with some audience members, but the overall effect of “I Love Boosters” is undeniably powerful. Seeing a vision this unbridled onscreen is a breath of fresh air in a cinematic landscape overloaded with IP rehashes. Boots Riley is a genuine original, and in “I Love Boosters,” he makes a statement as wildly entertaining as possible.
