Boots Riley’s on Twitter. He’s reading your tweets. If you write about your plans to see his new film, I Love Boosters, on Tuesday, he’ll reply: “Not to be picky, but can you move it to Sunday or Monday? We need the weekend totals!” If you’re disappointed that the movie didn’t open in a theater near you, he’ll respond: “I need you to drive and see it on the big screen this weekend. IF we blow it out and over index we can expand our screen numbers for the second week.” It doesn’t matter if you have to drive five hours across Canada—you have to see I Love Boosters this weekend, so that the movie can over index and expand their screen numbers next week.
I have more respect for artists who mock, toy, and play with their audiences than those who rely on a political platform to give their work more “credibility,” whether it’s Sound of Freedom or I Love Boosters. But that’s not going to stop me from coming to his new movie and judging it on its own merits, Riley’s obnoxious public persona aside. Sorry to Bother You, his previous feature, made waves in the summer of 2018, and although it spiraled out of control in the last 20 minutes, it was a unique and often compelling piece of work. That was eight years ago, and in the interim he’s directed the television series I’m a Virgo, which was rejected from Cannes in favor of Sam Levinson’s The Idol—according to Riley. “Cannes didn’t pick Sorry to Bother You although they picked other stuff that had been played in their home country. They picked The Idol over I’m a Virgo. They didn’t pick I Love Boosters. They just don’t like my stuff. All good.”
Boosters follows the Velvet Gang, a quartet of black female shoplifters currently targeting the fast fashion empire of Christie Smith (Demi Moore). The Velvets—Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Eiza González, and Taylour Paige—sell their inventory out of a chicken shop, dodging the law and professional life in a surreal San Francisco, where skyscrapers lean and balls of garbage resembling Katamaris roll through the city. The world looks like one big candy-colored sweat shop, and the Velvets are eager to free their Chinese comrades once they discover a portable time machine/portal. By the end, they’re giving pro forma speeches about dialectical materialism, but much of Boosters’ 105 minutes is hardly boring or derivative: Lakeith Stanfield plays a demon eager to suck the souls of women’s bodies during oral sex, corporate overlords turn out to be skinless freaks, and use their magical “situational accelerator” to encourage mass strikes.
I Love Boosters is a mess of ideas, some better than others, but the worst is the title. For anyone unfamiliar with “booster” as slang for “shoplifter,” all it evokes is the COVID-19 pandemic. The messaging about “boosters” and “getting boosted” was inescapable just a few years ago, and when Riley’s film was first announced, I assumed he was making a movie about the virus and the pharmaceutical industry. That would’ve been much more interesting, even if Riley has yet to make a fully coherent film. He’s got great visual sense; Shirley Kurata’s costumes and Christopher Glass’ production design are especially impressive. But after a strong start, the film has nowhere to go but the inevitable anticlimactic but politically correct ending.
More than anything else, I Love Boosters reminded me of Everything Everywhere All At Once, albeit a touch more technically sophisticated. Incoherent but easy to look at, humorous but rarely funny (much like One Battle After Another), I Love Boosters is another mixed bag from Boots Riley, not a failure but still a non-starter, and a bit behind the times. Doesn’t a vaccine satire sound better, Boots?
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM