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. 

Connection Lost: ZOLA and PVT CHAT

Two recent indie dramas, Zola and PVT Chat, build character studies with an unusually frank, open, and realistic understanding about sex and disconnection in our modern world. They’re both built from internet culture and as such have an understanding about the ways in which modern lives can become nesting dolls of fictions and identity. Sometimes it gives you control over your mind and body; other times it cedes that control to others. Our new ways of connecting with one another can breed new disfunction and separation, even from our true selves.

This idea becomes a quasi-comic semi-thriller for director Janicza Bravo, who wrote Zola with Slave Play’s Jeremy O. Harris. The movie, a mix of lurid based-on-true events and self-reflective humor, plays as tossed off and eccentrically personal as a Twitter thread. Fittingly, just such a viral story is what it’s based on. We meet our narrator Zola (Taylour Paige) as she meets her match: an energetic young woman (Riley Keough) who becomes a fast friend. Big mistake. She invites her on a road trip to Tampa where a weekend performing at a lucrative strip club will make them big bucks. Bigger mistake. It’s the past-tense of the narration — borrowed from the flurry of vernacular tweet speak and played off with buzzing alerts and time stamps in iPhone fonts — that gives the movie a gloss of wry melancholy, while the present-tense buzz of suspense and incident keeps the episodic one-thing-after-another on the right side of compelling. The story soon grows to include a pimp (Colman Domingo) and a boyfriend (Nicholas Braun) and a host of strange Floridians in and around the sex work trade. The film is full up of the kind of off-beat detail and memorable personalities that imply dark emotional undercurrents and strange backstories simply by casting memorable faces and expert actors to inhabit them.

As Zola falls deeper into the unfortunate and dangerous events of this wild weekend, the movie remains committed to her perspective — aside from one briskly funny side-step into an alternate version of events. Through freeze-frames and overlapping dissolves, Bravo highlights the woozy confusion and destabilizing falling sensation of getting so much further in over your head than you’d ever imagine. The dance between dark intent and light comedy adds to the wobbly tone — in a good way. And then Paige’s lead performance is so breezily wounded, both traumatized and above it all in a dazzling surface of openness and charm underneath which churns a self-flagellating what-did-I-get-myself-into? mixed with a how-do-I-survive-this? Throughout, constant selfies and posts, Vines and ads, flow through the character’s lives, building images to which they can’t or won’t conform. The movie explodes outwards even as it falls inwards. And wrapping its events in its telling somehow makes Zola’s plight more bearable even as it gets squirmingly suspenseful and ends abruptly. We know she’ll make it out; and we know she’ll reclaim the story — and her body — as her own.
 

Ben Hozie’s PVT Chat is more restrained, like its obsessive lead character. He is Jack (Peter Vack) a young man who makes his living gambling on internet blackjack. Between rounds, he cruises sex chats for cam girls. His favorite is Scarlet (Julia Fox), not just because she’s attractive and good at dirty talk, but because he finds himself wanting to have normal conversations with her. In a weird way, they start to play out like awkward dates. Sure, he’s paying for her time, but his addiction to the sensation starts to get conflated with real affection. She actually likes him, right? he wonders. As we follow him through his daily life — chatting with his landlord and a handyman; attending a friend’s art show; playing round after round of cards — he becomes increasingly interested on the moments he gets an alert that his favorite cam is live. The movie captures a sense of the digital and the tangible intermingling, where the unreality of a virtual connection starts to take on qualities that feel present in his life. One can feel the erotic potential in their relationship despite the fact they’ve never met; it’s clear memories of her still buzz in his head as the handheld shots follow along behind him down his routine New York City streets. We get a sense he might be a loner, but for how engaged and animated he is talking to this girl he’s never met in the flesh. Yet when a woman he knows in real life invites him over, he remains distracted. Why focus on the one he can actually be with, he seems to unconsciously decide, when he can chat with the one he can’t.

The movie is clear-eyed, and the performers trust their director and the material enough to expose themselves for the sake of the project. It’s unflinching, yet generous. It’s observant, but doesn’t exactly judge. It eventually opens up to take in Scarlet’s perspective, and seeing behind the screens from her side is a productive reminder that the connection and disjunction flows both ways. Their relationship is so transactional, despite the fact that they can push that aside in the moment. Their relationship is entirely intangible, computer-moderated, digital bits. And yet they’re in each other’s heads all the time. They share ideas about art, about life. He likes when she takes control; and yet it’s all verbal. He likes giving himself into her force willingly, even as he pries into her life and starts to think maybe, just maybe, he could actually find where she lives. That plot element dances on the edge of creepiness, and the movie knows it. The movie’s cheaply framed and presented realism underlines the blurred lines — emotional, physical, psychological, sexual — in these lives, and the actors complement the spare style with bare displays of their character’s obsessions and aimlessness. By the surprisingly bittersweet conclusion it’s clear that this is a connection that will need some distance to remain healthy, even if it means having to pretend there’s still that space where they can look and talk, but can’t actually touch.