Is Boots Riley‘s “I Love Boosters” the first socialist stoner movie of the Trump era? It would appear so, and like his previous film “Sorry to Bother You” and Amazon series “I’m a Virgo,” it’s set in a world where gravity doesn’t apply, and a world constantly spinning off its axis that reveals, among many things: high-concept sci-fi, gross-out sexual body horror, and Demi Moore as a tyrannical, late-capitalist fashionista that three working-class, rookie Bay Area criminals move to take down.
They’re played by Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige, three comic geniuses totally attuned to Riley’s weird rhythms and absurdist world-building. It’s set in the Bay Area — across Richmond, Hayward, Oakland, San Francisco, and beyond — where a high-rise built at a tilt of 45 degrees, perhaps in parallel to San Francisco’s steep hilly streets, is just a fact of life. Or where LaKeith Stanfield, as an elusive local lothario, uses his legend-has-it oral sex skills to literally suck the souls out of women. That’s just a fact of life around these parts, too.
Even as Riley’s high-concept, allegorical sci-fi spins wildly out of control, especially around a teleportation device that’s somehow both under- and overexplained, the three actors ground a dizzying, entertaining acid trip that plays all the way to the back of the room. A “booster,” as Corvette (Palmer), Sade (Ackie), and Mariah (Paige) are, is a shorthand for someone who steals luxury goods and resells them on the streets at a lower price point. Think of it as community service; they do, at least.
Corvette and Mariah are squatting in a shuttered chicken shop, where Corvette sews dreams of being a designer, specifically admiring the luxe but unimpressively bland designs of Christie Smith (Moore), who’s spun off her haute-couture empire into a suite of fast-fashion brick-and-mortars throughout the Bay Area. Stores where all the clothes are printed in the same color, and if you want a different shade, “deal with it.” Speaking of a 45-degree tilt, the film’s funniest scene has to do with Christie’s abstract apartment, as Corvette treats a coffee cart like a dumbwaiter but literally can’t get out of the room due to its angle.
Corvette, Sade, and Mariah’s ongoing scheme involves sending a helpless white woman into a luxury department store to cause a distraction (or a mess), allowing them to swipe enough wears and shoes to resell at consignment levels. The film opens with Corvette as a honey pot for the criminal operation, luring men off the dance floor and into her pop-up shop of illegal goods. None of the women is especially a criminal mastermind, so when Corvette hatches a plan to infiltrate Christie’s shops and hopefully make her way to the designer’s rumored $100,000 suits, they find themselves deep in over their heads. This is a shoplifting comedy without any pros at the helm.
Moore is caustically funny, riffing off a schematically sketched cutthroat fashion maven — whose aviator-glasses-clad look is Jenna Lyons adjacent — that reads as puddle-deep on the page, but the recently Oscar-nominated actress sells the outrageous role. Stealing a scene later is Will Poulter as a Christie Smith general store manager, styled in head-to-toe green and a swirling shock of hair like a bitchy queen out of Oz. Riley, best executing his admirably all-over-the-place sensibility in the episodic “I’m a Virgo,” has a gift for outfitting his world with zig-zagging subplots and outré side characters who compel your attention away from the main show. Similar to how “Sorry to Bother You” uncovered a dystopian conspiracy in which powerful white men profited off the backs of Black workers, “I Love Boosters” spirals into a galaxy-brained tangle of out-there ideas rooted in Riley’s publicly communist worldview. It’s a conspiracy so insane that it’s about one molecule away from adrenochrome.
That conspiracy happens to involve Don Cheadle in the craziest fat suit and prosthetics you’ve ever seen as the head of a democracy think tank that has pyramid-scheme ideas about invading the rich: Treat people like Peter Thiel, Oprah, and Bill Gates with kindness, and anything could happen. This aspect of the movie, which ends up recalling the Christmas Adventurers of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” is poorly executed and doesn’t make a lot of sense by the time the film has pummelled you with political protest. But “I Love Boosters” does make great use of stop-motion animation as Cheadle and his coterie are revealed as their true selves. Far-flung from the Bay Area of its setting, “I Love Boosters” also brings us to China, where the sweatshop responsible for Christie Smith’s ready-to-wear clothes is in turmoil and protest. And workers are wanting to rise up.
It’s there that the factory heads running up Christie Smith’s sweatshops get their hands on a teleportation device that could help circumvent shipping costs to the United States (tariffs, anybody? Some of these political beats sound very familiar indeed). Jianhu (Poppy Liu, a standout in TV’s “Hacks” and “Dead Ringers” but here underserved) is one factory worker pissed off and fed up; when she brings the teleportation device to the shoplifting Velvet Gang’s attention, the results are more confusing than insightful, and frankly, hampered by what was surely a budget lower than what the ambitions called for.
“I Love Boosters” is also extremely blunt in its metaphors, especially a ball of unpaid parking tickets and lien notices that keeps hurtling at Corvette. Palmer, however, is fantastic; whether or not playing almost the same character she did in “One of Them Days,” the “Nope” star is a tremendously gifted comic actor capable of finding pathos anywhere she goes. Take a line from her that stuck with me: “I’m even lonely when I’m with people.” We can all relate to that. Underserving the film’s strong performances, though, is a relentless score by Tune-Yards, Merrill Garbus’ Oakland-based music project that also soundtracked “Sorry to Bother You.” The music does not give you one second to breathe, even as you’re trying to process this film’s brash and rousing political message.
A late-breaking monologue about Marxist philosophy and how it ties into that teleportation machine does not help make this movie any more accessible to the masses, but Boots Riley deserves applause for his brazen vision. Cinematographer Natasha Braier, too, makes the case for the California Bay Area as a place deserving of more on-location shoots, and specifically Riley’s sci-fi twists on them. He loses grip on the material overall, but as far as genre movies that actually turn out to be political missives go, there are worse entertainments. And with Keke Palmer at the front, you’re always in sure hands. I don’t know if we love boosters, but we certainly like them.
Grade: B
“I Love Boosters” premiered at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival. Neon releases the film on May 22.
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