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I Love Boosters is a Messy though Thrillingly Offbeat Socialist Polemic

Boots Riley is someone with a very distinct sense of style. This is evident just from looking at the man -with his often colourful, zoot suit-inspired clothing aesthetic, his intense sideburns, and signature large hat, he’s the kind of person who stands out in a particular way -and none of these choices are accidental. He has stated openly that much of this look has come about through his relationship with boosters, i.e: people who shoplift exclusive or expensive clothing from high-end retailers to resell at a discount to those of low-income status. He has a considerable degree of respect for boosters, whom he characterizes as latter-day Robin Hoods. It inspired a song by his hip-hop group The Coup twenty years ago, that he has now translated into a movie.
I Love Boosters is partly a love letter to the people who do this, but it is mostly a diatribe against the politics of the fashion industry, its bizarre excesses, and its exploitation of workers and the public. The movie argues for and justifies the actions of boosters by emphasizing the callous attitudes of the figures at the top next to the dismal working conditions of the labourers who manufacture and sell their products. It’s a righteous case to make, but Riley doesn’t quite make it as succinctly as he could.
Much like Riley’s previous film, Sorry to Bother You, I Love Boosters is set in a strange, surreal approximation of our world that is probably not quite as exaggerated as it might appear. It follows three boosters in the San Francisco Bay Area known as the “Velvet Gang”, growing in popularity as a nuisance to retailers. In spite of this, Corvette (Keke Palmer) -an amateur designer- has a certain admiration for the apparent stylistic creativity of the CEO of a franchise called Metro, Christie Smith (Demi Moore). But on finding out that Smith stole a particular design from her, Corvette and her more idealistic cohorts Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Maria (Taylour Paige), hatch a plan to take down Smith’s fashion empire, in this process intersecting with the exploitation of both the overseas workforce in the form of a Chinese sweatshop and the domestic employees severely disillusioned and underpaid.
That doesn’t begin to hint at exactly where the movie goes and what else is included in it, such as a mysterious though somewhat arbitrary potential love interest for Corvette played by LaKeith Stanfield and some unexpected, though very sophisticated stop-motion animation. Riley very much runs wild with his script as he consistently piles on both new layers of commentary and bits of bizarro humour. It is such that the ‘Boosting’ becomes almost an afterthought, which at least Sade at a point is aware and modestly critical of. For a movie called I Love Boosters, it gets away relatively quickly from the apparent virtue in boosters, concerning itself more with weightier subjects of class, labour, and big business.
Those are greater areas of comfort for Riley though, and he is exceptionally good at lampooning with visceral purpose the hideous excesses of ultra-capitalism. Smith, with her cutthroat arrogance, stylistic pretensions and barely contained racism (she frequently identifies her adversaries as “low class urban bitches”), is a human incarnation of just about everything you might be able to wield against the fashion industry. It can all be summed up in her ludicrous headquarters, a leaning glass tower where  every floor is on a right angle. Her stores undergo a drastic monthly aesthetic turnaround -where everything is required to be monochrome, with no consideration at all for the bafflingly intensive labour this kind of strategy requires. Employees are given a mere thirty seconds lunch break and of course there are racist connotations to the hiring practices. The jargon Smith or her on the ground avatar Grayson (Will Poulter) talk in is of course utterly meaningless.
As Riley would no doubt argue, this is not a satirical accentuation of the fashion world but an illustration of how it really functions with blinders off. And he ties it emphatically into themes of socialist philosophy, which is integrated in the film very inorganically through the magic powers of the movie's central macguffin. The scene where Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez), a labour organizer, explains to the boosters its properties of dialectical philosophy -even with visual aides- it comes off as dense and heavy-handed in a manner that similar expressions in Sorry to Bother You managed to avoid. There is a fair bit of fun weirdness that comes out of this, but it is again a little messy when it comes to the climax -where a lack of coherence undercuts the message Riley intends on labour exploitation and general strikes. His didactic inclinations are not served by this style of presentation.
Thankfully he employs a lot of gonzo humour that still remains a strong-suit for him, delivered by a cast of funny performers completely dedicated to the absurdity. Palmer plays like she does best, Ackie continues to impress with her range, and Paige is a minor revelation here with some unexpectedly strong goofy moments. Moore, Poulter, and Poppy Liu as a late addition to the Velvet Gang are also quite funny and Eric Andre makes the most of an unhinged cameo. But then there are the likes of Don Cheadle, under layers of prosthetics as a motivational coach, and Stanfield's vaguely French smooth talker, who Riley didn't have much of an idea for beyond a single joke or satirical point. Stanfield especially seems to come from a different movie, and a particularly freaky and insane one, but especially given how that desired romance with Corvette plays out you wonder why Riley felt the need to force such a disparate subplot when it appears to clearly be a concept independent of everything else the movie is about. It's entertaining though at least.
So too is the movie's visual language and Riley's consistently engaging direction and editing. The craft and flow through transitions and musical devices (courtesy of the eclectic Tune-Yards) is as off-the-wall as Sorry to Bother You. Motifs and dialogue move between scenes and contexts effortlessly and with a rhythm befitting the movie's tone and sharp aesthetics. It should go without saying that a movie about fashion has an extremely interesting fashion sense -so much of the costuming exists within a happy space of weird and dynamically appealing. The looks of this movie are invariably distinct, even where the fashion is meant to be tame or homogeneous. It just has a stupendous, confident sense of style. And I really appreciate the leaps that Riley takes with the contours of his film's reality. Details that speak to its artificiality that itself is a metaphor for the artificiality of the systems he lambastes. It takes the form occasionally of old-fashioned or cartoon-like effects (some false backdrops and the like), and is most prominent through a third act elaborate chase sequence involving stop-motion animation that Riley clearly appears to have an affinity for as an artist. On a more affecting note is the giant boulder that Corvette occasionally sees coming after her, a symbol of her materialist anxieties, and how it ultimately manifests by movie's end.
Predominantly a forum for both Riley's eccentric creative impulses and his pointed political outreach, I Love Boosters strays far from its implicit concept and into a wild and full-throated castigation of capitalist inequity and exploitation through the fashion industry lens. And when it is not knee-deep in the finer points of Marxist theory, it delivers well some resounding points on labour rights and corporate profiteering. It is funny, original, and inventive if not so finely-tuned as Riley's other works, distracted at times by Riley's comic or rhetorical impulses not always organic or appropriate to the material broadly at hand. But Riley is still a compelling and singular artist -and on those merits his latest satirical manifesto is satisfyingly outrageous.

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