I LOVE BOOSTERS
2026
Written and directed by Boots Riley
Whatever else, you gotta be a little amazed that in A.D. 2026 you can go out to your regular old AMC multiplex in Pennsylvania and watch some genuine communist propaganda—explicitly so, and Marxist propaganda, at that. Less amazing, maybe, is that I don't know how entirely fulfilled your expectations would be if you were told it was a Marxist propaganda film. It's a movie that talks the talk—arguably to a fault! and we'll get there—in order to wind up in a place that's basically just, "more unionization would be nice" and I guess that's true, though it's not like it's some realist drama, it's out there on the edge of nonsense; and I could see someone wanting something more cathartic or utopian or whatever. Even as, like, theory goes—which I don't especially care about or even know that much about—you know it's Marxist primarily because you already know Boots Riley is a Marxist, and he's not just teaching you Fichte's (only arguably Marx's) version of Hegelianism for its own sake. On the other hand, I witnessed what may or may not have been a walkout when the commie terms of art started up in earnest, so firstly, not everybody knows who Boots Riley is, and secondly, I suppose it's not devoid of any impact.
Now, to stake a position early, it's also a pretty fun time at the movies, didactic purposes aside, fairly strong as an anything-goes comedy and the kind of movie that earns the appellation "maximalist" (it is apparently the law to use that word in any review) as a compliment, though maybe by the same token it manages to get away from itself. Still, it starts off on relatively straightforward terms: in San Francisco or at least the general Bay Area (I think parts of it may take place in Oakland, but California is an exotic and undifferentiated fantasyland to me) there is a crew of "boosters," the Velvet Gang, who, fortunately, run towards the "Robin Hood" end of that spectrum and will not prompt irritating post-film conversations about your more run-of-the-mill organized shoplifting rings and why the correct leftist position is to be happy about subsidizing bandits with higher prices and tolerating social disorder. The core of the group number three, Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Acke), and Mariah (Taylour Paige), of whom Corvette is if not the de jure leader then first amongst equals and our protagonist, a disillusioned would-be fashion designer who squats inside a defunct chicken restaurant and holds a parasocial awe and grudge against real-deal fashion designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whose ridiculously unaffordable and silly but very cool clothes make her storefronts a target of the Velvet Gang's operations.
Soon, they hatch a more-elaborate-than-usual plan for One Big Heist, even getting jobs at one of Smith's stores where they meet nascent labor organizer Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez) and suffer under supercilious manager Grayson (Will Poulter), but their scheme is stymied when someone cleans out the place from right under their nose, their rival—though she could be an ally—being Jianhu (Poppy Liu), recently arrived all the way from Smith's factories in China, though certainly not by the usual means, on a mission to disrupt Smith's business until such time as she fixes the deadly conditions in her sweatshops and gives her workers something like a 7 1/2 cent raise. Once the Velvet Gang gets ahold of Jianhu, they realize that her supernatural ability to empty a whole store in seconds has a lot more to do with the device she's purloined from her bosses, a "teleshipper"—a teleportation portal (that also seems to have some kind of industrial vacuum function, because it works like you just opened an airlock in a space thriller). But they also realize they have some confluence of interests, insofar as even if their goals are being pursued at what you might call a different level of consciousness, it's true that everybody still wants to stick it to that rich bitch.
And yeah, right up until "teleportation ray" I Love Boosters doesn't have any obvious weaknesses and many obvious strengths, one of those simply being the nice comic patter from its ensemble, but pretty much everything is some kind of strength, arising from the very loosy-goosiness that's soon enough going to be a problem, but which isn't so far apparent, because as yet every goofball, archly-satirical concept is landing, from the sonic wallpaper of the asinine and obvious neoliberal plants who keep showing up on television to decry, well, uh, retail shrinkage and social disorder, to the amazingly fun physical comedy of Smith's "elite" luxury condo that, for satire's sake, has transposed a somehow even-more-ludicrous version of Manhattan's 161 Maiden Lane to San Francisco, so that all visitors to Smith's apartment (which will include Corvette, posing as a servile) must navigate a 45 degree incline lest they tumble into the far wall. If not that (and I could be persuaded this contemporary, class-based Gold Rush homage does take the cake) the single biggest strength is the idiosyncratic strategy that Smith pursues "luxury fashion," which takes the form of monochromatic events whereupon Smith decides which color—which single color—shall be in, to the exclusion of all other hues, so we get visions of her storefronts that feel like a mid-century musical in their colorful abstraction but even moreso because there's a bunch of racks and displays with yellow or green or whatever clothes standing everywhere, which is very aggressive and delirious and a joy to play in. (It's kind of like half a feature's worth of "Think Pink" but across most of the rainbow.) The store, anyway, is also where we find the most consistently-successful, or at least most consistently-successful and best-integrated, comic performance in the movie in the form of Poulter's let's-agree-he's-on-the-right-side-of-homophobic manager, whose petty capitalist tyranny and—more to the point—extraordinary pretentiousness are deliciously funny. In part this is because he gets the single best joke sequence in the movie, a long, haughty speech continually interrupted/translated by Gonzalez involving something akin to the exchange "we help our customers choose what light they reflect"/"he means what color the clothes are," and partly because he's such an unserious visual concept, from the streak of company-mandated dye in his hair down to how his fashionably-snug suits actually kind of fit his hips poorly.
When the teleporter shows up, we're no longer going to be spending much time in the stores, or—maybe oddly, because at this point "drop the villain out the window" has in fact become a viable option!—Smith's house, which means Riley has to some degree surrendered both of his movie's greatest assets, Christopher Glass's production design and Shirley Kurata's costume design, which up until the widening of the action have pretty much been two sides of the same coin; and if it abandons Kurata less (happily, the movie has some great nowhere-but-in-a-satire-of-fashion costumes all throughout), it's still a bummer, not least because this not-very-expensive movie, that's to this point never felt inexpensive at all, starts to betray its $20 million price tag a lot more in its second half, with any scene larger than a room—and we're not getting many more of our previously established rooms, mind you—feeling a little small and claustrophobic. Which doesn't entirely change even when it's deliberately small and claustrophobic in pursuit of boisterous and cartoonish action-comedy.
So there's that, although the teleporter also starts opening the film up to concepts that have not previously been part of its ken, and I don't suppose I'd want a Riley film to hold back because a great deal of their pleasure is how they don't hold back, and don't have any obvious filters regarding what's "coherent" or "a good idea that we can appropriately realize." It's certainly the same filmmaker who made Sorry To Bother You, which we all said at the time of its release (an unfortunate eight years ago!) sure did feel like a guy throwing every idea he had into a movie in case he never got to make another one; Sorry To Bother You is, in full earnestness, the vastly more disciplined version of this. (I cannot at present speak to his Amazon TV show, I'm a Virgo.*) Halfway through, this hugely-whimsical but focused movie becomes more like an uncontrolled firehose, mostly because of that teleporter which is not a teleporter like in Star Trek but some kind of metafictional condensate that exists in order to, like, do jokes about dialectical materialism. Are jokes about dialectical materialism funny? Funnier than they have a right to be, I guess: it has modes, anyway, that involve deconstructing things into their opposing theses, or—at this distance from the movie, I'm sort of guessing on the exact phraseology—accelerating the synthesis or maybe the words "heighten the contradictions" are uttered, which in practice means it's a magic gag gun in addition to being a teleporter, with gags ranging from "deconstructing" one of our heroes into her constituent concepts (i.e. her parents fucking, which... I don't think is what Hegel meant by "thesis" and "antithesis") to turning textiles into plants, so it's less a very intellectual joke engine than it is just a silly time gun, even leaving what I'd think are some obvious jokes on the table (they "accelerate" a cop into a futuristic super-cop, when for once I thought I'd actually gotten ahead of this incredibly chaotic movie, and predicted they'd "deconstruct" him into something with some, you know, actual political valence). For good and ill, then, Everything Everywhere All At Once is finally starting to have some downstream effects.
Mostly, it doesn't work visually, just this thing that our heroes keep blasting puke-like CGI out of at adversaries, imagery that gets old pretty quickly but is a pretty sizeable fraction of the last half. It does at least feel like it's directly connected to the movie's goals, however brutishly (incidentally, the attempt to refashion dialogue re: worker solidarity into personalized emotions better fit for a movie is incredibly admirable, and still feels kind of canned). Then there's just the genuine errata of I Love Boosters, most notably an entire semi-major character played by LaKeith Stanfield, a demon—a demon, you know, from hell—who is so seductive he warps the cinematic image, and also so good at eating pussy that it kills you, thereby, I suppose, continuing the actor's "additional screenplay material by" streak from last year's Die My Love. Now, let's be clear: this is funny, and Stanfield is Poulter's stiff competition for "most consistently-successful comic gesture," but you'll see why I may have had to hand it to the latter for "best-integrated." Or we could look at a certain reveal (I'd still be loathe to spoil it) regarding a side-project that our fashion villain's been up to, which has even been set-up as early as the first few minutes of the film, and, indeed, is probably the most fascinating sci-fi satire idea this movie ever proposes, and it doesn't... really matter or get pursued very far. It is also pretty noticeable that, beneath the anarchy, Riley seems to have a formula: it's an impossible-to-predict reveal that comes at about the same place and the same time as Sorry To Bother You's impossible-to-predict reveal, except, for one thing, in that film it actually did something, and for another, that impossible-to-predict reveal productively upended the entire narrative, taking something that had obviously been a very heightened, cartoonish reality—but a heightened, cartoonish reflection of our own—and turned it into gonzo body horror allegory. This would probably be a similar escalation into gonzo body horror allegory, except it's a world that's already had teleporters and Marxist rayguns for most of an hour, so what exactly would pull the rug out from under us now, especially if it's not going to do anything?
To be fair, it does prompt a bizarre third act chase with creatures and vehicles and what I'll elect to treat as a pretty charmingly lo-fi conceit, in that the majority of its higher-flying action and body horror is stop-motion animation (or CGI intended to resemble stop-motion animation, I'm not sure), which because it felt so much like the (stop-motion-assisted and 2-D, respectively) corresponding segments of The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch really crystallized a feeling I'd had for a while with I Love Boosters, which is that whatever else this one's a lot more indebted to Wes Anderson than Sorry To Bother You was; and, you know, "communist Wes Anderson" is something I'd very much like our cinema to have. (The impression is not dispelled by a score from the eclectic indie group—Wikipedia refers to them as "a music project," which checks out—the Tune-Yards, who also worked on Sorry To Bother You but I don't remember them working this hard: it's very present, and while it's not really "Desplatian," if that be the correct adjective, it's getting at the same dizzy, giddy carnivalesque feeling of spiraling nonsense that an Anderson action climax would like to give you; I should probably clarify that I absolutely do think that the Tune-Yards are a positive force in the movie.) On the other hand, as neat as this is, by this point we've gotten a lot of whirligig nonsense to keep track of, without an accompanying amount of narrative tethering, and despite some feints at the teleporter becoming a montage-building device in a chase through entirely different parts of the planet (and, if I remember correctly, a literal live-action cartoon manhole), the movie feels more like it's deflating; that third act finale is setting itself up some difficult cross-cutting challenges that Riley and not one but two editors (Terel Gibson and Matthew Hannam) just aren't meeting, with a whole multi-threaded Return of the Jedi climax laid out for them and then letting an entire faction of heroes accomplish their part of the mission offscreen.
Which is a pity, because I Love Boosters had been working up till now with some pretty solid editing and a penchant for cool, unconventional transitions, but then something like that had to come along and trip it up; and this, along with all that conceptual flailing that threatens to become more wearying than it is enjoyable, is why I can only say it's good. It could've been great—there's a lot of great in it! like three or four great movies' worth of it, none of which are entirely compatible, jockeying for its 113 minute runtime—but hey, last time I checked good ain't bad. And I'm still glad there's something like this in the world, an unhinged slapstick cartoon that always has the jaunty indifference and the do-anything-for-a-laugh attitude of a ZAZ or Savage Steve Holland lark; and that, get this crazy shit, even manages to make "ideology" a pretty fun thing.
Score: 7/10
*I guess there's no ethical production under capitalism, either, huh? But in fairness, I already knew that. I mainly haven't watched it because it is a TV show, and I'm extremely reluctant to devote tens of hours to anything since TV destroyed its own medium in the mid-00s, though I also have only now realized it's just four ~25 minute episodes, which, uh, so it is in fact "a movie," isn't it?
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