★★★ (3 out of 4)
This baby pops! Expect nothing less from Oakland-based rapper Boots Riley. He wrote and directed “I Love Boosters” as an explosively hilarious fashion party. It also comes in hot as a bruising capitalist takedown that Karl Marx might have written if he’d seen “The Devil Wears Prada,” both parts, after bingeing the slapstick anarchy of the Marx brothers. That’s Boots for you. From 2018’s “Sorry to Bother You” to his 2023 streaming series, “I’m a Virgo” about a 13-foot-tall Black teenager, he’s a comic revolutionary.
Warning: Boots does have a tendency in his surrealist sci-fi fantasies to lose the thread. Humor him. He’s worth it. Besides, if you don’t hang loose during this half-crazed but fully committed love letter to shoplifters, you shouldn’t be watching it in the first place.
The star spot goes to Keke Palmer, the best wild card any movie could hope for. Keke is a singer, talk-show host, scream queen, comic dynamo (“One of Them Days”) and good enough at drama to win an acting award from the snooty New York Film Critics for Jordan Peele’s “Nope.”
Here she plays Corvette, the leader of the Velvet Gang, a trio of struggling boosters from the Bay Area. Corvette, along with frisky Sade (Naomi Ackie) and shy Mariah (Taylour Paige), steal from upscale stores to resell the goods at a discount out of car trunks and bathroom stalls.
Chief target for the Velvet Gang is top luxury brand Metro, run by fascist design tyrant Christie Smith (Demi Moore, outrageously, unforgettably over the top), who’s not above doing a little boosting herself, especially when it comes to snatching ideas from Black designers.
Corvette’s plan is to send one of her own sketches to Metro, get hired at one of its stores and expose the place from the inside. Wouldn’t customers like to know how Metro exploits Asian labor to sell luxury duds to one-percenters? And if that means creating a toxic cloud by sandblasting denim, so be it. The catch is that the goods, the glam, the lifestyle hit the sweet spot for Corvette. The devil wears Prada and so would Corvette if she could afford it.
And I tell you, it’s really something to see the faceoff between Corvette and Christie—she calls the boosters “low-class urban bitches” and hates them for reducing her margins. This is class warfare in miniature and Boots runs with it. Keke is an indisputable force of nature and Demi meets her in a middle fraught with tension. The take-no-prisoners comic scalpel wielded by Boots is perfect for skewering politics, race, the media and rampant consumerism. And it’s after that when things really get weird.
Boots, born Raymond Lawrence Riley and nicknamed “Boots” since he’s worn the foot gear constantly since childhood, kicked into orbit with “Sorry to Bother You” because it’s a no-mercy satire that gets up in your face, breaks all the rules—and then invents new rules so it can break them, too. Now he does it again, only better. Did you expect any less from the leader of the politically conscious, never-less-than-incendiary hip-hop collective The Coup?
‘This baby pops.’
Surreal is too fragile a word to describe what happens next. Just know that detours are a friend to Boots, a way to meet an unrecognizable Don Cheadle as pyramid schemer Dr. Jack, Eiza González as Violetta, a labor organizer who wants to unionize Christie’s sweatshop, Will Poulter as the gang’s color-coded boss who allows only 30-second lunch breaks, LaKeith Stanfield as a dazzling Prince-lookalike demon and Poppy Liu as Jianhu, an exploited worker who teleports in from one of Christie’s appalling Asian sweatshops.
Yes, I said teleports. Nothing is out of bounds for Boots, especially the kind of supernatural fantasia that zooms past the contours of magical realism. And his tech team, including camera wiz Natasha Braier, production designer Christopher Glass, costume designer Shirley Kurata and the very best musical collaborators in the Tune-Yards, conspires to produce miracles. And he does it on a budget small enough at $20 million so Boots can hold off from completely selling his soul to the company store. For how long? I’m hoping it’s forever.
Boots has always said that the point of his art is to "instigate class struggle" until the working class stops getting exploited by the ruling class: "There's no getting out of it until we overturn this, until we have a movement that creates a whole different system.”
It’s doubtful that one movie, even one as hilarious and hot-tempered as “I Love Boosters,” can get all of that done. But it’s definitely a step in the right direction. Sure, the movie overreaches, but that’s surely preferable to the alternative. Riley brings a deeply anti-corporate, pro-worker sensibility to his stories of ordinary people confronting oppressive economic and social structures. What’s not to love?