Robbin' Good: I LOVE BOOSTERS

Rapper-turned-writer/director Boots Riley has a lively imagination and a righteous sense of social satire. Together those qualities make for movies that are electric and chaotic in equal measure. His first feature was the unpredictable 2018 comedy Sorry to Bother You, in which a Black call center employee gets big bucks for deploying an unctuous “White Voice.” That hook soon spun off into wild flights of fancy that slowly diluted its emotional punch in favor of vulgar shocks. Now, nearly a decade later, we have Riley’s second film: I Love Boosters. It has more focus, and even tighter control over the filmmaking fundamentals. It’s a riotous, candy-colored story of have-nots versus a have. It also indulges in bits of magical realism until they take over and turn the movie’s heightened reality into nesting dolls of metaphorical unreality. Yet if it gets less funny as it gets more fantastical, Riley never loses interest in double, triple, quadruple underlining every satiric point. It helps ground all of its interests that the characters are such big, likable personalities. The film’s snappy start introduces us to the Boosters: a lovable group of shoplifters who sneak expensive designer clothes and accessories out of department stores for the reselling. Steal from the rich and sell at a discount to the poor. “Fashion forward philanthropy,” one says. Their ringleader is Keke Palmer, one of our most appealing leading ladies in another of her bubbly, appealing underdog roles. She has an easy, relaxed charisma and a hustling forward momentum. Her accomplices are Zola’s Taylour Paige and Mickey 17’s Naomi Ackie. They give the trio a loose, charming chemistry as they enact increasingly unlikely daring midday heists. Their determination and their friendship dovetail nicely. 

One step ahead of getting caught, and two steps ahead of bill collectors, they’re a scrappy, working class counterpoint to the stylish villain of the picture. From a leaning luxury apartment in the middle of San Francisco, a billionaire fashion designer demands her underlings find these thieves who threaten her retail empire, and further commands her Chinese sweatshops ignore safety and work harder for less to make up for her losses. Demi Moore plays her as if every line was a speech bubble in a political cartoon. She comes across as blend of Cruella de Vil and Miranda Priestly—but somehow both more evil and more believable. Riley has such a clear, totalizing vision for the movie. It has broad, almost cartoonish stylistic curlicues—editing as punchline, pop-art titles, background sight gags, Palmer hallucinating a literal ball of stresses—and then, by the second half, gives way to total fantasy. You might not expect from the small-scale opening that it’d build to a largely stop-motion action finale—let alone a supernatural creature that’s merely a minor side-character or a sci-fi device that operates at the speed of plot. But that’s Riley for you. The movie doesn’t have much of a sense of who its characters are beyond ideas in the points its scoring. But it’s fast and funny and they careen through an increasingly crowded ensemble and convoluted plot. The story’s mechanics lose a few springs and gears in the hard turns, and a finale that wraps up with a flourish of wishful thinking. But the vibrant colors and coordinated gestures and cartoon logic and vulgar jokes build to bold conceits. In an increasingly bland, homogenized cinematic landscape, I’m glad we have Riley out there making movies so distinctive, delirious, and committed to shouting sharp satiric points with style.