The credo of Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters is best summed up by a repeated line of dialogue: “Now is not the time for nuance.” It’s exchanged on several occasions between members of a ragtag fashion heist group, as they try to avoid or deny personal contradictions. They do so, notably, in a film that tries not only to highlight clashing opposites but also to educate its viewers about them through surrealist satire. The movie wears its heart (and its brain) on its bedazzled sleeve, and it ensures you know exactly what its politics are at every turn, usually through news chyrons or characters explaining underlying themes practically down the lens. Riley is perhaps the only overtly Marxist filmmaker working in Hollywood—itself a contradiction, with which he wrestles here—so the anti-nuance of his perspective is commendably audacious, at least in theory. In practice, it’s visually and emotionally incoherent, and seldom entertaining, squandering potent ideas by making them thuddingly obvious and unpleasant.
Riley’s style has a gonzo energy that worked wonders in his 2018 debut, the race-and-class-driven call-center satire Sorry to Bother You, two-thirds of a great film buoyed by purposeful aesthetic and thematic evolutions. He brings that same audiovisual verve to I Love Boosters, which makes for an entertaining intro to his bubblegum, arts-and-crafts world. However, these designs seldom elevate (and are seldom elevated by) his scattershot storytelling. The movie follows small-time con woman Corvette (Keke Palmer), who both admires and steals from fancy fashion designers to make ends meet, with the Robin Hood excuse of making high-end clothes affordable to the average Joe. Corvette’s sisterhood, consisting of amusing but underutilized Black actresses like Naomi Ackie and Taylour Page, are known as the Velvet Gang, and they engage in ludicrous shoplifting schemes that are usually worth a laugh, like when Page’s character Mariah holds her breath to magically appear more light-skinned, and in the process, attracts less suspicion. It’s magical realism by way of maximalist social commentary, as is Riley’s M.O., and it yields the occasional debonair technique, like a moment of fearful realization captured with a gliding double dolly à la Spike Lee and a space-warping Hitchcockian dolly zoom. But these fun little flourishes soon fall by the wayside.
The gang eventually targets one of Corvette’s idols, the blunt, high-strung, micro-aggressive Christie Smith (Demi Moore) by working in one of her exploitative retail outlets. This kicks off a loopy sci-fi heist saga whose oddities work individually on occasion, but the totality of which is a headache. It’s a great-looking film to be sure, assisted by the fact that Smith’s boutiques only stock clothes of one loud shade at a time—as Will Poulter’s pedantic store manager reiterates—allowing the visual palette some variety between scenes. However, the imagination behind Riley’s ideas seldom digs deeper than this ostentatious surface.
Corvette’s financial anxieties are externalized in the form of an enormous ball of bills and eviction notices rolling downhill, following her through initial heist scenes like a boulder chasing Indiana Jones. But this playful conceit exists only to reiterate what’s already been established about her life, before disappearing altogether. Kaleidoscopic cues, like Smith’s penthouse tilting at a severe angle, afford Palmer some wonderfully cartoonish physical comedy. However, ideas like these feel pulled from a hat and dropped into Riley’s creative process without rhyme, reason or resonance in later scenes. You might chuckle in the moment, but in the long run, it’s hard to locate lasting meaning behind the visual language.
Instead, an assemblage of political ideas—surrounding race, housing and policing, all wrapped in a send-up of respectability politics—are presented through secondary and tertiary means, like TV screens blaring the news in broad, easily digestible parody and pamphlets denoting pyramid schemes as a path to financial freedom. That Riley can so effortlessly flesh out this world’s fictitious propaganda makes it all the more disappointing that the tangible details of the world itself are only slightly tilt-shifted from our own (and sometimes, literally tilted), yielding an uninspired mockery of power. “What if a thing you recognize was slightly bigger?” is hardly biting satire, to say nothing of how poorly this lacking visual ambition bodes for a film about fashionistas.
The story eventually widens to include a Chinese character, Jianhu (Poppy Liu), whose own grudge against Smith concerns the treatment of her factory-working family in Qingdao, as the film attempts to connect the dots of capital and labor across the globe. However, its “Workers of the world, unite!” underpinnings are severely kneecapped by its half-baked genre metaphors that are at once too complicated and over-simplified.
Without getting into excess detail: a metaphysical gizmo ends up at the center of Jianhu and the Velvet Gang’s punk rock schemes, but its tongue-in-cheek function rests on characters having to explain what it actually does for much of the runtime, leading to unwieldy, motor-mouthed monologues about dialectical materialism. While this device is designed to grant heady ideas a digestible visual form, the fact that it requires ceaseless exposition is practically the film becoming an accidental metaphor for its own failures to transform the conceptual into the emotional or the visceral. In the process, this gesture towards Das Kapital ends up appealing only to those already immersed in Marxist or Hegelian theory, but not in any meaningful way beyond mere reference or base recognition. It’s the Glup Shitto of communism.
How exactly does this work on screen? Usually, someone explains the theory underlying the aforementioned MacGuffin, and how it either heightens contradictions or deconstructs elements of the mise-en-scène (it may as well be wizardry), but very little of this is inherent to what transpires on screen. It relies largely on dialogue imbuing Riley’s images with clunky meaning—that is, when the camera deigns to actually capture the punchlines. Some of the movie’s chase scenes, although rendered with neat artistry like stop-motion, whiz by so quickly, and with such haphazard editing, that the gags are partially glossed over, if not entirely missed. The whole film feels chopped to pieces. It’s neither polished enough to satisfy the average cineplex patron, nor impressionistic or discombobulated enough to be avant-garde. Instead, it exists in a lukewarm, malformed middle ground, and it feels like it landed there by accident.
At the heart of I Love Boosters is, in fact, a simple but revolutionary idea: that fashion, and creativity at large, belong to the people, who can steal it back from predatory corporations by uniting against them. It’s hard not to read this as a question of cinema itself, and how mainstream visual art in the United States exists at the mercy of the profit motive. But the expression of this idea is far from radical, with symbolic genre musings bogged down by pedestrian outcomes. For example: the film employs its genuinely transformative sci-fi gadget to give already-disgruntled workers some nicely worded picket signs, as though the proletariat were primed for protest, but were being held back only by a lack of organizational conviction. In keeping with the gizmo symbolizing the filmmaking process, perhaps exploited workers just need an I Love Boosters to really get the hint. There’s an unavoidable self-importance to the film that supersedes what could’ve been its actual importance; rather than stirring the soul awake, it lectures it to sleep, and it doesn’t do a particularly polished or compelling job of this either.
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I LOVE BOOSTERS ★ 1/2 (1.5/4 stars) |
Ironically, Corvette’s story is elucidated through the strict confines of capitalist cinema, wherein the primary emotional concerns are tethered to an individual protagonist and a by-the-numbers arc that feels entirely obligatory. Underscoring her character is the notion that she’s lonely, something we’re told several times by her comically mysterious love interest (played with ferocious commitment by Lakeith Stanfield, whose presence sends visible ripples through the fabric of the screen). The antidote to Corvette’s isolation, we’re told, and told, and told, is connecting to other people, something she eventually does through organized rebellion. It’s a nice thought, but it would’ve been nicer had it been shown, and dramatized, rather than being repeatedly mentioned.
One could argue that the singular protagonist, with their individual goals, has endured because it’s a more interesting mode of big-screen storytelling (or, you know, an easier one to sell in individualistic societies), but filmmakers in the Marxist tradition, like Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Jean-Luc Godard—the latter of whose name Riley practically invokes on screen—were responsible for creating new forms of montage wherein ideas were captured through suggestion, abstraction, motion and rhythm, or even cinematic arrhythmia. If they went against the grain, it was to open new pathways to understanding what movies could do or could be—and therefore, how we could relate to them and to the world around us.
By (perhaps unfair) comparison, I Love Boosters features some of the most banal unspooling imaginable for a film buoyed by such spicy buzzwords as “heist,” “high fashion” and “class consciousness.” Its only trailblazing element is the zany, eruptive score by music project Tune Yards, which creates momentum at times, and emphasizes some of the hard cuts to comedic images (the Velvet Gang shuffling out of a clothing store wearing dozens of stolen layers is a raucous delight). But gosh, is it ever a letdown to have a filmmaker all but pop up on screen to remind us what his movie is not-so-secretly about, before failing to live up to not only his own political objectives, but some of the most basic visual tenets of narrative filmmaking. Down with the bourgeoisie? Absolutely. But must the revolution be so sloppy?
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