I Love Boosters

dir: Boots Riley

2026

I didn’t love I Love Boosters, but maybe that’s my fault.

There is a lot of movie here, so there should have been plenty for me to latch on to, or at least some morsels here and there to keep me sustained during the long stretches where elements didn’t cohere or connect.

Like his earlier film Sorry to Bother You from 2018 (I have to admit I have trouble remembering that 2018 ever happened: I mean, that was pre-covid, so good luck with that I say to myself), things start off okay or at least in a graspable fashion before the proceedings hit a brick fucking wall of silliness and then I have trouble focussing on what’s happening for ever more.

Boots Riley I imagine is a deeply creative artist and deeply bizarre individual who somehow got given 20 million earth dollars to make a movie that is about fast fashion, worker exploitation, dialectical materialism and whatever other crazy shit pops into his mind along the way.

And none of it gets edited out.

Ostensibly, this flick is about Corvette (Keke Palmer) and her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), and how they steal bunches of clothes in order to sell them for money in order to get by, but also as revenge against one designer who thinks she’s an entrepreneur. What it’s really about is…

Well, take your pick. If it’s a satire or exposé of the fashion industry, the flick says nothing that doesn’t come across as simplistic or token, or even that accurate, that even the staunchest pro-free-market worker exploiter would deny – for countries that enjoy super cheap clothing, they have to be made super cheaply in countries where no-one gives a shit about worker pay or safety.

Whose fault is that? It’s not Demi Moore’s fault, nor is it the fault of the character she plays called Christie Smith. Do I blame consumers for the deaths of Bangladeshi workers in factories where the managers chained the doors to stop them from fleeing from fires? No, but we play our part. I am too tired to blame capitalism, or its artisanal, bespoke current version “late stage capitalism” for the times when people decide to put profits above people’s lives, but that’s been happening at least for the last 4000 years.

Before that? I’m sure it was an absolute utopia. Overpriced yet supercheap clothing that ends up in landfill anyway after a few wears is the very visible tip of a ginarmous iceberg of environmental and workers rights problems that US and elsewhere mass consumption barely grapples with, just like this flick.

It’s far more interested in making strange, strange jokes but also to indulge in Boots Riley’s every whim and colourful random thought.

And that’s not even when it hits the first of its many brick walls. If every movie, if every story we’re lucky enough to be watching, to be hearing, to be reading, needs to cast a spell over us in order to capture our interest, sometimes it feels like filmmakers go out of their way to shatter the illusion and remind us that we’re watching a construction, a confection, and that’s not great for cohesive talespinning.

Corvette has some interactions with a mysterious, suave chap played by LaKeith Stanfield, great in this like he is in everything that his weird arse is in, where when he talks Corvette herself is entranced, with reality around him distorting in humorous ways.

But that’s not weird enough for Boots Riley. Oh fuck no. Someone has to relate to Corvette a story she heard about someone who hooked up with his character, and we have to see it, and then…

The film kinda falls off of a cliff, and then like the Coyote in the old Warner Brothers cartoons, it keeps falling and smacking itself into the many jags and branches on the way down. Many of those jags and zigs and zags pulled me way out of the film and left me watching it from a distance as I wondered what the actors thought about what they were saying and doing, and whether they felt embarrassed or not, or whether it was like most acting gigs.

Because there are a million characters in this flick where their presence and purpose isn’t entirely clear (even after watching the whole film), many of them seemed, at some points, as baffled as I felt. Eiza Gonzalez plays a character in this flick, maybe you can argue is a disaffected employee / labour organiser, as someone trying to encourage other employees of these Metro stores to unionise and be activists for their own rights, but there are long sections where she’s spouting both science fiction nonsense AND Marxist dialectical materialism nonsense and vaping, and it’s amongst the least convincing things I’ve ever seen in my life.

And that brings me to the major cliff after the other cliffs that the flick falls off of: much of the film is very colourful sequences where Corvette and her friends are stealing lots of stuff they never seem to sell or get much financial benefit from. It alleviates none of the precariousness of the main character’s collective lives, even though it’s symbolised by a giant ball of bills that the main character keeps being threatened by. But Corvette is also obsessed with Christie as if she wants Christie to adopt her or approve of her, or something. So when Christie calls Corvette and her peeps low class urban bitches, which is hardly an insult, Corvette gets even angrier and then decides… to steal more of Christie’s clothing off the racks, which she was doing anyway??

And then when she finds out Christie stole one of her (terrible) designs? She gets even angrier and… decides they have to steal even more of her stuff.

But in the process of working at one of Christie’s stores, and stealing shit, they find that someone using a magical piece of technology has stolen all of the clothes already that day.

You see, a factory worker in China gets her hands on a machine that has these settings. One teleports stuff from one place to another, vast distances, whatever.

Okay. That’s not too complicated. I grasp that. So this recent arrival to the States steals back the clothes she and her fellow indentured slaves constructed, the theory being that this will make Christie accede to their demands to not die under terrible work conditions and to get paid slightly more than a pittance.

Come on, Jianhu (Poppy Liu), that’s your solution, your bargaining chip to bringing down the neo-liberal globalisation massive supply chains of worthless crap pipeline? To steal some of it back?

So even if Jianhu, like everyone in this flick, has barely any idea how to achieve their goals or plan anything or do anything meaningful within a flick where nothing seems to be meaningful, the teleporter machine isn’t complicated enough.

Oh no, it’s not. So they fiddle around with the switches, and then the industrial relations activist explains in between vapes that the teleporter also has a “situational accelerator” function as well as a “deconstructionist” setting as well, in case you were wondering where the kitchen sink and a bag of chips was.

Am I overreacting? Is it really that different from any other fantasy maguffin plot devices in other movies?

Uh, yes, significantly so, but what are you going to do, complain?

Sure, why not? Once we accept that teleportation across vast distances is possible as a concept, why can’t we come along for the ride and accept these other functions as well, and that when someone pointed a deconstructionist ray at someone, it would flash back to them disappearing and their grunting naked chubby parents having sex in their place? And why wouldn’t we want to brush up on our Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser or Frantz Fanon, and have someone say “thesis, antithesis and synthesis?” as if it’s dialogue we’re meant to find funny and trenchant and meaningful?

Oh, damn, you didn’t realise this was going to be homework? There’s probably some math in there as well.

Maybe these all hit differently with different audiences, but I found myself as I was watching this thinking I was watching a sketch comedy show that didn’t know when to stop or how to actually deliver a punchline, which feels really, really churlish to say, because I’ve seen all of the people in this in way better things. And I’ve seen many of these people in better films that came out this year, even.

And instead of belabouring the fact that the overall affect is one of incoherence and me not caring about anything happening, watching it from a bemused distance, and wanting it to be over while still being faintly horrified / tantalised by what nonsense might come next, don’t even get me started on the ballad of the “$100,000 suits” that Corvette becomes even more obsessed with. Stealing all of Christie’s other terrible pret-a-porter clothes didn’t change anything, but Corvette is convinced if she steals the really important suits, finally everything will be better.

The suits end up being skin suits that dishonest people wear, both Black and white tangential characters, who then exploit the Black community. So there are long sequences of stop motion animation ‘people’ without skin running around, doing stuff, saying things, wanting their suits back from Corvette.

No, no, Corvette’s friend with two young kids says, we must sell these suits for my kids.

And then there was conflict between the friends, where one would say something, and the other would look confused, and this happened for a while, and then they agreed: we’ll destroy some of the skin suits, and sell others, that way something is achieved

Huh. That’s, uh, deep. When they’re not looking utterly baffled as to what they should be doing or saying, the actors sometimes look like they were maybe having fun? I think once you reach your 30s maybe playing dress ups isn’t as much fun, necessarily, but some of the wigs and outfits looked great?

If the flick gets something else horribly wrong, it’s a grotesque sound mix which overloads a good many scenes with music, sometimes weirdly incongruous music, drowning out normal dialogue. And the weird thing about that is there’s a scene at one of the terrible clothing shops where an annoying manager keeps playing hard techno so loud we deliberately couldn’t hear the dialogue over.

And then Riley’s joke on the rest of us is he does it throughout the film.

I will admit, with some humility, that I might not be smart enough to really get the film and everything it’s trying to do. Even as someone who will always side with workers over management, with the underdogs, with the downtrodden and exploited over the exploiters, and who would love to live in a world where an ‘art installation’ of a film like this could inspire people to unionise and fight for their rights and everyone else’s, even as someone predisposed to liking movies just like this, it was seriously all beyond me, and in some places, a painful experience.

I hope someone, somewhere, loves Boosters. It’s just that, it won’t be me.

4 times Jean-Luc Godard dies for somebody’s sins but not mine out of 10

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“Now is not the time for nuance, Sade!” – there should always be time for nuance - I Love Boosters

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi959892249/