If Ryan Coogler is now considered the Steven Spielberg of Bay Area filmmakers of color, Boots Riley should be hailed as the Bay’s answer to Tim Burton.
Though it was shot in Atlanta, Riley’s latest film I Love Boosters has the Marxist, maximalist hip-hopper/writer-director once again presenting his Oakland home base as a dizzying dreamland — bringing to mind the colorful, chaotic mischievousness of visual auteurs like Jacques Demy, Ray Harryhausen and, of course, Burbank’s own Burton — where unfazed Black folk go through some bizarro stuff. It’s almost like Riley and Atlanta star/creator Donald Glover are locked in a battle over which multihyphenate can make his predominantly Black region look the most like an Afrofuturistic amusement park.
Just as his 2018 debut Sorry to Bother You was Riley’s wackadoo take on Black folk struggling to keep their integrity (and sanity) in a white-dominated society, I Love Boosters — yet another title taken from the discography of Riley’s hip-hop crew The Coup — is a story of Black struggle. But this time around, Riley shows some love to the working-class sistas who gotta steal and scheme and squat in an abandoned chicken shack in order to keep it pushing.
That’s where we find Corvette (Keke Palmer, in deadpan desperado mode), who — along with her besties Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) — boosts clothes from high-end stores and sells them on the low. Corvette would rather design clothes than steal from the stores of her idol, self-centered fashion impresario Christie Smith (a flaky, foulmouthed Demi Moore). But since a gigantic boulder carrying her bills and debts is always following her, Corvette unfortunately has to get her jack on.
Seemingly the only movie about fashion this year that doesn’t star Anne Hathaway, Boosters sees Riley making some satirical jabs at the fast-fashion industry. With glowing help from production designer Christopher Glass and clothing designer Shirley Kurata, Riley has The Velvet Gang (that’s what they’re called) shoplifting from so-called chic outlets whose knack for periodically draping everything in one color exposes how they’re really temples of brain-dead conformity and low wages. (A fussy, bespectacled Will Poulter shows up as the passive-aggressive manager of one store.)
Things get metaphysical when the ladies team up with a fed-up Chinese factory worker (Poppy Liu) who goes after Smith’s empire by taking her clothes and sending them back to her homeland. She does this with help from a circular teleportation device that can also turn people into their stylish, authentic selves. Much like when South Park’s Trey Parker zapped strangers with an orgasm gun in his porn-industry satire/superhero spoof Orgazmo, the gang goes around town giving huge money shots to those in dire need of a makeover.
Just like when he introduced those revolting (in every sense of the word) horse people in Sorry to Bother You, Riley gets a bit ahead of himself when he slides into twisted science-fiction territory, amping up the allegorical anarchy that Boosters already has in spades. (I’m Black — don’t start!) Nevertheless, Boosters has a punkish, unpredictable energy that still makes it a fun watch. After all, this is a movie where we get an uncoiled, unrecognizable Don Cheadle, covered in dreads and prosthetics as a shady, pyramid-scheming life coach — not to mention Sorry star LaKeith Stanfield as a demonic fuckboy who sucks the soul out of women in a seductive but gruesome way.
Smooth-talking, ain’t-shit men are among the myriad things that turn these ladies of color (also including Eiza González as a vaping, highly informative ally) into a band of avenging antiheroines. Along with giving us another round of absurdist, anti-capitalist agitprop with I Love Boosters, Riley has also done something I haven’t seen a Black male filmmaker do since F. Gary Gray had Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett Smith go on a girl-power-fueled bank-robbing spree in Set It Off: He made a Black-as-hell heist movie that also passes the Bechdel test.
