Boots Rileys’ Latest is a Hoot

PLOT: Three shoplifters/boosters (Keke Palmer, Taylour Paige, and Naomi Ackie) take aim at a soulless fashion tycoon (Demi Moore) in a surreal caper.

REVIEW: Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You was a whacked-out satire, but if you thought that movie was off the wall, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The director’s long-awaited follow-up is a completely gonzo caper comedy, where the stakes escalate from shoplifting to interdimensional time travel without a blink. The fact that by the time stop-motion, animated, skinless bad guys begin pursuing our heroines, it doesn’t even seem all that unusual in the world he’s created says something.

It’s unlike anything I’ve seen recently, and while the exhausting vibe occasionally makes it feel like an endurance test, it all comes together in an easy-to-absorb message about how big business exploits both its workers and customers, and that sometimes a line in the sand needs to be drawn.

Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer who’s been reduced to squatting in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant. She makes ends meet with a highly intricate boosting operation, where she and her two friends, Naomi Ackie’s Sade and Taylour Paige’s Mariah, routinely clean out designer boutiques and resell clothes for about 30% of their value. There’s a modestly philanthropic side to the operation, with them clothing folks who can no longer afford the necessities, but largely their crimes are a way of striking back at Demi Moore’s Christie Smith, a soulless fashion maven at her wit’s end with the boosters, who specifically target her stores.

I Love Boosters has a strong supporting cast, anchored by Palmer’s Corvette, who, despite her loathing for Christie’s tactics, can’t help but harbor some admiration for her empire, being a frustrated designer herself who favors bold colors like turquoise (or, as she’s corrected by Christie, aquamarine).

The film is a scathing satire of business and high-end fashion, with Christie’s fashions quite gauche, and each new line uses only one color, including piercing yellow, orange, and more. While Palmer is the star, Paige and Ackie have a lot of presence as her fellow boosters, as they get caught up in the increasingly surreal adventures, which hit a zenith when Poppy Liu shows up as a portal-hopping worker from a Chinese sweatshop hoping to undo Christie’s empire. A lot of big names show up in small parts, including an unrecognizable Don Cheadle, buried under layers of prosthetics as a pyramid-scheme-loving guru, Eiza González as a wannabe revolutionary working in one of Christie’s stores, and Will Poulter as a pretentious, wimpy boss. Riley’s Sorry to Bother You star Lakeith Stanfield also shows up in a supporting part as the object of Palmer’s affections — a model for a TJ Maxx catalogue who also might be some kind of demon or vampire. Moore, for her part, relishes playing the completely unsympathetic villain, tapping into the same grand guignol style as her big comeback movie, The Substance.

Riley’s visual style is a hoot, with Natasha Braier’s cinematography embracing bold, primary colors, while the production design feels like a mix of Brazil, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and TikTok. I especially loved Riley’s deliberately fake-looking VFX, with lots of stop-motion and miniatures contributing to the movie’s overall vibe.

While I Love Boosters often has a little too much going on, to the point that I would have liked to pause it a few times to keep it from feeling like overkill, it’s certainly one of a kind and boldly original. It’s a big swing for Neon, who produced it in-house, but the audience I saw it with at SXSW loved it, and with Palmer’s recent One of These Days making serious cash, I’d bet on it crossing over beyond the arthouse circuit and into the mainstream

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