Written and Directed by Boots Riley | 105 min | ▲▲▲▲
Prepping to see the new feature from rapper-turned-filmmaker Riley sent me back to my comments on his debut, Sorry To Bother You. My sentiments for his first effort could easily be carried over to this one, but almost everything about his second time at bat is better, including the wild, unexpected science-fiction twist in the third act.
What we have here is a surreal, exciting, and fun social comedy taking shots at our late capitalist system and the fashion industry, specifically from an African American cultural perspective. It’s messy in places, but it’s a joy to witness and genuinely subversive, maybe the most out-there fantasy since Everything Everywhere All At Once.
The Velvet Gang are a group of boosters, Robin Hood-esque thieves who hit local clothing stores and resell their wares for profit and pass on some of that to the community. They are Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie), and Mariah (Taylour Paige), with various other part-time colleagues. Corvette has a genuine interest in fashion design and is a fan of Christie Smith (Demi Moore), the doyenne of local high-end chain, Metro Designer, where they offer store-specific monochromatic wear — if you want a different colour, you have to go to another store. Smith is no fan of the Velvets, calling them “low-class, urban bitches,” and before long Corvette realizes Smith has stolen her design ideas.
Naturally, the Velvets redouble their efforts to target the Metro Designer stores, with Corvette getting a retail gig at one of them alongside labour organizer, Violeta (Eiza González), under green-haired manager, Grayson (Will Poulter). Meanwhile, local character Dr Jack (an almost unrecognizable Don Cheadle) is offering a pyramid scheme of friendship to tackle loneliness, exploiting his own community. This while Pinky Ring Guy (LaKeith Stanfield) takes an interest in Corvette, and she in him, though she’s concerned about his seductive power. She learns he may be a demon who sucks out the souls of women he goes down on — that scene itself is worth the price of admission.
This plot summary barely scratches the surface of why I Love Boosters is such a kooky, good time. As soon as Corvette pictures her anxiety about being able to afford her life as a stop-motion, Raiders Of The Lost Ark-styled giant ball of garbage and bills rolling down the street, I knew I was on board. The fantastic, jaunty score by Tune-Yards with a few choice needle drops brings all kinds of fun to the table, along with the amazing, colourful and creative costumes. Apparently there is a skyscraper in San Francisco that’s sinking and tilting, but Riley takes that reality to a whole other level when presenting Smith’s office — her floors are closer to a 45 degree lean.
On The Daily Show, Riley had this to say about his work, which speaks to the themes of his film:
“All the art that I’ve ever made is about trying to help people find the tools to change the world around them. And right now, what we need to change the world around us is a mass, militant, radical labour movement, one that uses the withholding of labour as a tactic and a strategy to be able to have policy change […] until we have that kind of movement where we can shut down profit, that can do the things that affect power, then we’re going to be powerless […] sometimes struggle, class struggle, is edited out of film.”
To his credit, all of this is in his picture — everything from a critique of poor working conditions, wages, and other corporate labour practices — even as it’s delivered in the silliest way you can imagine. We get a car chase through a mall where vans climb escalators, chipping pieces of concrete off the ceiling. We get characters who remove their skin, or skin suits — it’s a little unclear. We get a woman from China, Jianhu (Poppy Liu), drop into all of this utilizing a device that works as a teleporter — tech in China used to improve shipping speed and costs — but it can also affect dialectical materialism, withs settings for “situational accelerator” and “deconstruction.”
Does this all work — or even make a whole lot of logical sense? Nope, but Riley never takes his foot off the accelerator, for better and occasionally worse. By the time you get to the part of the story that reveals the hideous working conditions of people in factories making Christie Smith’s clothes, you’re either a passenger in the van up the escalators or you’re not.
