With billionaires running the country, it feels like the perfect time for a new movie from musician, filmmaker and no-apologies socialist Boots Riley. The creator of 2018’s Sorry to Bother You (see sidebar) and the limited series “I’m a Virgo” (2023; Prime Video) returns with I Love Boosters, a rollicking, surreal fashion-industry satire that is also a broadside against capitalism itself. As of press time, see it at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier, Partizanfilm in Burlington, Essex Cinemas or Majestic 10 in Williston.
The deal
Aspiring fashion designer Corvette (Keke Palmer) lives in a repurposed fast-food joint in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she runs a “boosting” operation with her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige). Known as the Velvet Gang, they shoplift clothes from Metro Design, a chain owned by haughty design tycoon Christie Smith (Demi Moore), and sell them to the community at a discount.
While Corvette is proud of her “fashion-forward filanthropy” — the misspelling is strictly for branding purposes — she yearns for more, so she sneaks into Christie’s office wearing one of her own creations. When the gang applies for jobs at Metro Design, Corvette discovers that Christie has stolen her designs for a new collection.
As they plot their revenge, the Velvet Gang meets Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a rival booster equipped with a teleporter, with which she has transported herself from Christie’s sweatshop in China. Meanwhile, one of their new Metro Design coworkers (Eiza González) is organizing a strike. Joining forces, they all set out to take down Christie’s empire.
Will you like it?
Watching I Love Boosters is like wandering through a bustling street fair combined with a rummage sale combined with an avant-garde theater festival. So much is going on visually and aurally at any given time — from the Velvet Gang’s ever-changing costumes and wigs to the percussive energy of the score by Tune-Yards to the scrappy special effects — that we’re thoroughly entertained. Yet it can be hard to keep hold of the narrative thread, especially when the story plunges into outright science fiction.
The film’s characterization often suggests improv, with motivations fluctuating to fit the moment, while its plotting has the episodic quality of sketch comedy. Yet the overall theme comes through loud and clear, especially when Riley uses inventive visuals to convey it rather than words.
At intervals throughout the film, for instance, Corvette flees from a rolling boulder consisting of bills, overdue notices and ATM machines — a satisfyingly graphic representation of poverty. We see the hegemony of Christie’s “vision” in the Metro Design stores, each of which sells clothes of just one color. And we learn how that merciless control trickles down to labor when the women take sped-up 30-second “lunch” breaks.
Playing a tech bro in the angular body of a fashion icon, Moore gives a scenery-chewing performance that makes Christie deliciously despicable. The designer, who’s also a science prodigy, claims to be revolutionizing the world on her incessant live streams. Preaching futurism one second and hurling gutter insults at her enemies the next, she’s eerily reminiscent of certain overexposed billionaires we know.
Riley has plenty more satirical targets, including pyramid schemes that prey on the urban poor, casual racism in the retail world and the propagandistic use of media. (In a running joke, TV news in this slightly alternate reality consists mostly of canned testimonials from folks labeled “Crying Black Mother” or “Based Young Dude,” all extolling the virtues of cops and capitalism.) The sweatshop subplot, fanciful as it is, gives a new and powerful dimension to the film’s pro-labor message, expanding it to the global level.
When a character explains that the teleporter operates on the principles of dialectical materialism, however, our attention may start to fray. In its second half, I Love Boosters becomes so frenetic and fragmented that it feels like a Marxist version of Everything Everywhere All at Once. Crammed with content for a tight attention economy, the movie is a lot, and sometimes too much. At its best, though, it’s a great hangout film, with wonderfully random comic elements such as the guy (LaKeith Stanfield) trying to romance Corvette, whose mesmerizing charm hides a meme-worthy secret.
Making openly political art for today’s jaded audiences isn’t easy. We can feel Riley throwing everything he has at the screen, hoping to hit some viewers where it counts. The result is a little chaotic, but if you wanted more from the mildly anti-capitalist messaging of The Devil Wears Prada 2, I Love Boosters is a perfect fit.
If you like this, try…
Sorry to Bother You (2018; Howdy, Kanopy, rentable): In Riley’s debut satire, which feels like it shares a universe with I Love Boosters, Stanfield plays a telemarketer who starts using a “white voice” and gets promoted to the upper echelon of his company, only to make horrifying discoveries.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022; HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): The breakneck pacing and gonzo surreality of I Love Boosters recall this Best Picture Oscar winner in which Michelle Yeoh plays a laundromat owner who finds herself saving the multiverse.
Fucktoys (2025; opening-night film at the Queer Film Fest, Friday, June 5, Savoy Theater in Montpelier): In this candy-colored odyssey that is only loosely tethered to reality, Burlington native Annapurna Sriram (who also directed) plays a hapless sex worker trying to cleanse her karma. While not as overtly political as I Love Boosters, the movie offers plenty of goofy countercultural humor.
This article appears in May 27 • 2026.
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