I went into I Love Boosters without seeing the trailer. I distinctly remember reading the synopsis telling myself, “Okay, I have enough information for what I’m about to see.”
Reader, I did not.
From writer/director Boots Riley, I Love Boosters is an ensemble comedy, heist film starring Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, and Demi Moore. Boosters (people who steal designer clothes and sell them for a reduced price), Corvette (Palmer), Sade (Ackie), and Mariah (Paige), target designer Christie Smith (Moore) when they discover she us passing off Corvette’s design as her own. Their journey to ‘hitting her where it hurts’ is windy and wacky, with surprise collaborators and unexpected hurdles… to say the least.
I Love Boosters is an enrapturing critique of capitalism, decadent and disturbing enough that you don’t want to look away, and so intelligent that the 113 minutes you spend watching are worth it. Riley goes all out with colour, framing, tonal shifts, and mixed media, pushing cinema in uncommon directions. At the beginning of the film, the only thing I could liken it to from memory was the camp of Josie and the Pussycats (2001) or Speed Racer (2008), which is probably very zillenial girl of me, but Boosters goes way further with its surrealism. For the form of storytelling it takes alone, Boosters needs to be experienced. But that’s not all it offers.
The visual absurdity of the film only amplifies the absurdity of the system that Riley is critiquing with it. Boosters touches on the extraction of creativity from a community and the gatekeeping of what is created from them, the spectacle of ‘art’ for the sake of it, giving of one’s entire life to an industry that gives back close to nothing and cannot be bothered to learn your name (the understated gags with Sade’s name were killing me), how far people are willing to go to take care of their families and the ways people in power exploit that desperation, and the implications of those exploitative acts and ‘selling out’ on the wider community.
Ultimately, Riley reminds the viewer that real power is in the people’s hands. Production that keeps the system running only continues because there are people to let it. To hit the system where it hurts, Riley argues, organisation has to happen in the working class.
I Love Boosters is a film lover’s film, one of the ones people will be dissecting and studying for a while.
I Love Boosters is available in theatres on Friday, May 22nd, 2026.
