A still from I Love Boosters.(Courtesy of Neon)
If I asked you to describe what a communist movie looks like, you might think back to Soviet propaganda posters, to Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory, to black-and-white movies screened only in film class, to brutalist buildings all bearing the same look, and to a desaturated aesthetic that screams austerity. You might not think of Keke Palmer squatting in a vacant but decked-out chicken restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area.
You might not think of miniature chase scenes, stop-motion sequences, teleportation devices, vibrant monochromatic garments, a carnivalesque Tune-Yards score, or a tilted condo building like a Leaning Tower of Pisa for the Bay Area’s most tasteless. But Boots Riley’s second film, I Love Boosters, is kaleidoscopic, refracting the director’s radical ideas into a new kind of communist filmmaking.
Like his debut film, Sorry to Bother You, and his TV miniseries I’m a Virgo, I Love Boosters amps up the absurdities of everyday exploitation to point the way to a future in which more workers embrace the possibility of a successful struggle to claw back the wealth that has been stolen from them by business owners and billionaires. More than montage, Riley’s filmmaking feels like collage. It’s not trying to be perfectly clean or seamless. Its vision is deeply human and yet also refuses to hold back or moderate its scope.
Though it can feel like Riley is preaching to the choir, his real goal is to show people that they’ve been humming anti-capitalist tunes all along, even if they haven’t learned the words yet. His version of bringing communism to the masses is so bombastic and crammed with diversions that viewers might be inclined to forgive how overtly the film delivers its lessons. In practice, Riley’s depiction of the splendors and terrors and contradictions of living under capitalism’s thumb might not coalesce neatly, but for many, the message will be worth the mess.
I Love Boosters begins with a regular night out for Palmer’s character, an aspiring fashion designer and shameless hustler named Corvette. To a backdrop of vibey R&B, Corvette sashays her way through a nightclub until she lays eyes on a sleekly dressed man. Soon, she is pointedly asking him about his shoe size and taking him to a private room she keeps nearby. But Corvette isn’t looking for a hookup; she’s out to make a sale. She is a booster, meaning that she “boosts” items of name-brand clothing from fancy stores and sells them at a discount to people who would otherwise not be able to afford the flashy attire.
Corvette and her two co-conspirators (and closest friends), Sade and Mariah, aren’t exactly shoplifters. Instead, they are artistes of boosting—they know which stores to target, what distractions work, and the best way to get the clothing off the racks and into their van. They also choose their victims wisely: They mostly steal from Christie Smith, a haughty and self-righteous fashion mogul (played by Demi Moore) who is the owner and head of Metro Designers. Smith is Corvette’s nemesis and obsession. Corvette claims to hate her, but she can quote Smith’s memoir from memory. At some level, she wants to be Smith—or, at the very least, to have her validation.
When a security camera captures one of their heists and the footage is played on the news, Corvette and her friends are dubbed the Velvet Gang by the media, and soon the stakes get raised: Smith declares that boosters are her enemies and goes on TV to condemn them. As a result, the Velvet Gang has to get more and more inventive in order to execute its haute couture heists.
Corvette’s plans are interrupted when a new figure enters the scene: a rival with a device that can clear an entire shop of its designer clothes in a matter of seconds. The new booster is Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a worker from a Metro Designers factory in China who has stolen a teleportation device and is now using it to force Smith and her company to improve the life-threatening working conditions that afflict her family and coworkers. Realizing that they have a common enemy, the Velvet Gang and Jianhu team up, but for Corvette the struggle is still personal—she can’t look past her own animus toward Smith to see how her struggle and the factory workers’ intersect.
Even with Smith getting closer to catching them, the quartet is soon taking down one store after another. But teleportation is just the beginning; in typical Riley fashion, the giddy escalation never lets up. The gang discovers that the teleporter has settings that can both accelerate and deconstruct capitalism’s contradictions: In one episode, a coffee-fetching intern with his boss figuratively on his back is literally mounted by his boss (“He got his boss on his back!”); in another, it returns designer clothes into the raw materials used to make them and gives workers back the time they lost sewing them together.
Among all the acts of expropriation and the reversals of capitalist exploitation, a Bay Area–wide strike targeting the Metro Designers chain looms, and Jianhu and the Velvet Gang are transformed from petty criminals into revolutionaries. The dialectical teleporter is used to deconstruct thousands of Smith’s garments—giving thousands of factory workers back their time and health and turning employees into a phalanx of striking militants ready to transform the world.
Riley, who made his feature-film debut in 2018, developed his storytelling skills as a labor organizer in and around Oakland. He wrote short political skits for workplaces trying to unionize and planned rallies and shows to agitate for the cause of organized labor. Then, after seeing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” become a rallying cry in a neighborhood struggle with abusive cops, he became a musician. Music, perhaps more than any other art form, can bring people together in a shared aesthetic world. People feel deeply tied to music that conjures a world they want to be a part of (or already feel they are a part of). As the front man for the leftist hip-hop group the Coup, Riley aimed to make political commitment into something that didn’t have to be left outside the party’s doors.
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There’s a direct line from the Coup to Riley’s movies, but there are notable differences as well. The hip-hop traditions that form part of the Coup’s genealogy place an emphasis on lyricism and storytelling in verse. It’s about the funk and the feel, yes, but listeners are also primed to think about what the MC is saying. Mainstream movie audiences, though, are much less interested in listening to a political argument. They want a diverting story first, and any message should be gleaned from the implicit terms of the narrative and characters.
Riley’s storytelling style has always been one of excess, where the gags don’t coalesce but instead keep one-upping each other. And he never leaves his message to chance: There’s always a character to explain the political analysis that’s implicit in the narrative. At times, these characters’ monologues feel organic—after all, Riley has spent much of his life surrounded by organizers. But at other times, they can be disconcerting. In films so full of color and ideas, references and side plots, a lecture can bring everything to a screeching halt.
At its best, I Love Boosters is a ride so entertaining that you don’t stop to question it, but at its worst, it can feel too hectic—one idea tacked onto another tacked onto another, each adding color and texture to an already overstuffed collage. Corvette’s interest in fashion is more of a background detail than a defining trait; she has a fight with Sade that flares up out of nowhere and goes nowhere too; her love of the color turquoise and red candy feel like red herrings that are discarded by the film’s final act. There are gags galore, and as with all of Riley’s work so far, the end result is a general strike, although how that strike is achieved is still a bit mystifying. We never really understand why there is a Marxist teleporting machine, or how it can transform the principles of dialectical materialism into reality with the push of a button.
Yet as we come to the end of I Love Boosters, we realize that the film’s nature, both discordant and discursive, is part of the point. Riley’s protagonists never start out as radicals; they need life—and some able organizers—to help them get there in the midst of all of capitalism’s messy excesses. This is the ultimate message of the film: that the path to collective action is neither simple nor linear. It takes many detours and a lot of time to cover the distance needed for any real and lasting social change to occur. As Riley explained in a 2024 interview, even “if I could snap my fingers and get to revolution, I wouldn’t, because it’s all about the journey and what kind of person the journey makes us into.”
Jorge CotteJorge Cotte is a writer and filmmaker based in Chicago. His essays and reviews have also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The New Inquiry.