I LOVE BOOSTERS
(The 52nd Seattle International Film Festival ran May 7-17th in and around Seattle. Check out Jessica Baxter’s I Love Boosters movie review, fresh from the fest and in theaters now. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
As someone who doesn’t much care about designer clothes, I had no idea that the titular Boosters in Boots Riley’s new film were based on a real underground profession. Moreover, they’ve been around for a while. Riley wrote an ode to them in 2006 with his band, The Coup. When Riley introduced, I Love Boosters before a sold-out screening at the 2026 Seattle International Film Festival, he explained that Boosters perform the valuable service of “helping broke people look fly”. As the song goes…
A booster is a person who jacks from the retail
And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale
In these hard times, they press on like Lee Nails
In all of my experience, their sex has been female
The film, I Love Boosters, opens with a bang and never lets up. Riley’s follow-up to 2018’s Sorry to Bother You is even more uncompromising than his debut. The frenetic opening credits (which use a custom font that is instantly iconic) zoom you through the Bay Area, to witness some of the most striking class disparity in the country. It’s the perfect setting for an allegorical anti-capitalist comedy. Our guide in this fashion underworld is Corvette (Keke Palmer), the leader of a prolific band of boosters called The Velvet Gang.
Early on, the film establishes the mechanics of a boost. The Velvet Gang, which also includes Mariah (Taylour Paige) and Sade (Naomi Ackie), assemble outfits from past boosts so that no one is suspicious of them when they’re in these high-end stores. Their outfits have lots of pockets and/or storage space. There’s a new outfit (and wig) for each boost. The production clearly kept costume designer Shirley Kurata (Everything Everywhere All at Once) VERY busy. Each ensemble is more outrageous than the last. Some of the looks are giving The Fifth Element on ayahuasca (complimentary). Whatever they wear, our leading ladies have no trouble slaying while they steal. Once in the targeted store, one of them creates a distraction while the other two cram their garments with as many designer threads as they can hold without busting the seams.
After safely absconding with the goods, Corvette hits the Oakland house parties to find people in need of a designer glow-up. The first sale we witness occurs after a guy goes home with her, expecting to hook up. He’s a little frustrated when she first reveals her ulterior motive. Still, he does not leave before buying some sick new shoes at a great price.
The Couture Robin Hood gig hits a snag when the mogul behind one of their frequent sources, Metro Designer, catches wind of the Velvet Gang and makes it her personal mission to bring them down. What Christie Smith (Demi Moore) doesn’t realize, or at least pretends not to know, is that Corvette had beef first. Corvette once showed Smith some of her own designs. Smith rejected a collaboration and sold the designs as her own. Corvette frequently sees her work in Metro Designer stores, which only fuels her rage and determination to get compensation one way or another.
Despite The Velvet Gang’s prolific heists, they are all still struggling to make ends meet. For Corvette, this financial anxiety is manifested through a growing Katamari ball of debt that lurks around every corner. It’s far enough away to not pose an imminent threat but always menacing and inching ever closer.
Further complicating matters is Corvette’s frequent run-ins with Pinky Ring Guy (LaKeith Stanfield), who seems to simultaneously set off her alarm bells and appeal to her basest desires. And then there’s a mysterious rival booster who somehow manages to beat them to the punch with supernatural speed. Like in Sorry to Bother You, side plots brew in the periphery before coalescing in unexpected ways in the third act. There are the hilariously monikered “man on the street” interviewees constantly popping up on TVs around town. An unrecognizable Don Cheadle runs a self-help group called “Friends Being Friendly” that is so sus, they literally use a pyramid graphic to illustrate the claim that their members can rise in the socioeconomic ranks to surpass the likes of Jeff Bezos and Tyler Perry.
Corvette decides that she needs to make a big score to turn her life around, so she gets the Velvet Gang jobs in a Metro Designer store managed by a very high-strung corporate boot licker (Will Poulter in rare form). While she formulates her plan for the big heist, the two pre-existing Metro Designer underlings attempt to sell the Velvet Gang on unionizing. Metro Designer management requires staff to wear clothes from the current collection and pay for them out of their own, already criminally low wages. To make matters worse, their breaks are comically short, and their manager always maintains an extremely hostile soundtrack (called MAX VIBES), claiming that it helps “to give the customers a very FULL experience.”
Demi Moore devours her role as a monstrous hybrid of Anna Wintour and Steve Jobs (and perhaps several more figures from the Friends Being Friendly pyramid). Moore’s real life archival photos appear in recurring documentary clips that give her backstory as the “child of a plastic surgeon and a second-rate astrophysicist”. Smith loves to espouse Warhol-esque sound bite philosophy. “What you call fashion is really just making art out of life it-fucking-self” and “We can change everybody’s perception through color and fabric.” She’s not wrong about the power of fashion. The Velvet Gang uses it as a tool to infiltrate exclusive fashion spaces. But Smith is also a gatekeeper, a slave driver, and a plagiarist. She claims the Velvet Gang are her nemeses because they are stealing from her, but she stole from them first, and thousands of other people, such as the sweatshop workers who make her clothes. The Velvet Gang are her rivals, but it’s not because they steal her clothes. She’s an untouchable billionaire. It’s because boosters are also artists and their art is a hell of a lot cooler and more meaningful than Smith’s. As Smith gets increasingly frustrated, she uses her immense wealth and power to ruin Corvette’s life in ways the lower tax brackets could never imagine let alone orchestrate.
Though I can compare I Love Boosters to other absurdist social commentary comedies, there is no question that Boots Riley is a singular artist. The story structure and humor are reminiscent of Alex Cox’s Repo Man, but Riley is nowhere near as nihilistic. The parade of outrageous, impractical fashion feels like a nod to Zoolander, but Riley’s message is much deeper. Watching a Boots Riley film often feels like watching a perfectly executed homage to some iconic film from the last century, until you realize that what’s actually happening is that you’re experiencing a future classic in real time.
Riley’s use of color is very pointed and meaningful. Sometimes, a frame is aggressively colorful like the bright monochrome themes of the Metro Designer stores, and Meredith Smith’s rainbow striped sloped penthouse floor and chaotic wall art. Other times it feels celebratory, like every time the Velvet Gang assembles before a heist. In real life, high fashion often seems to shun color, but Riley practically weaponizes it.
And then there are the props and practical effects. Riley is a master of the sight gag, like when Corvette tries to relax in an expensive massage chair that seems to massage all the wrong things, and the visual expression of Pinky Ring Guy’s whole deal. Meredith Smith lives in a slanted building (that is apparently based on a real slanted building in SF), only this one is also slanted on the inside. One of my favorite extended sequences involves Corvette trying and failing to cross the room, while Meredith navigates the space like a fish in water. There’s also a hilarious bit that involves Mariah holding her breath, and plenty of other wacky things I don’t want to spoil for you. Another poignant statement from Riley before the SIFF screening: “We didn’t know if we were gonna get it made, and you’ll see why when you watch it.” Boy did we, although it’s hard to know which specific elements he had in mind with that statement. So much of the production is extremely impressive, if not mind-boggling.
A Boots Riley joint loves to jump headlong into thematic rabbit holes. There is no way in one million years that I could ever guess what will happen next. And yet, he always manages to tie everything together in the end. As the plot thickens, Stevie (Rachel Walters), one of the pro-union Metro workers, emerges as a stoner sage who helps the gang work through problems using vape-fueled monologues about Marxism and theoretical physics. She was my favorite character, and I have a feeling she might also be an occasional intellectual proxy for Riley’s own ethos. Stevie shows the gang that when oppressed people have too many goals, they end up impeding one another. The best course of action is to unite under a common goal against the Fat Cats creating the need for goals to begin with.
Riley came out of the gate a self-assured director. But I Love Boosters is more than just confident. It’s revolutionary. It sets its sights on the powers that be and dissects their motives so precisely, that anyone attempting to defend them looks like a total asshole. A film with this many intermingling intellectual themes could easily come off as preachy or tedious. But Boots uses a spoonful of surreal dream logic, absurdist comedy, and bold imagery to help that medicine go down. You’ll have so much fun that you won’t even realize you’ve been radicalized until it’s already happened.
For some of y’all folks, this stuff might phase ya
This ain’t the way the society raised ya
But most of it was made by children in Asia
The stores make money off of very low wages
The next time you see two women running out the Gap
With arms full of clothes still strapped to the rack
Once they jump in the car, hit the gas and scat
If you have to say something, just stand and clap
– “I Love Boosters” by The Coup
– Jessica Baxter (@TheBaxter)
