Achieving financial success at the box office and producing a film that feels vital and alive are often mutually exclusive aims. “Good” movies bomb all the time and “bad” ones make billions. But in the case of “I Love Boosters,” a surreal and unconventional heist movie, it is difficult to simply laud the film’s quality in face of its relative “flopping.” It is a film that engages with our society’s economic predicament in a way that makes its low grosses feel uniquely tragic.
In the weeks leading up to its theatrical release, Boots Riley, the film’s director, was omnipresent on X (formerly known as Twitter) imploring folks interested in seeing it to do so opening weekend. It became something of a meme how aggressively and passionately he was marketing his own picture, personally encouraging folks waiting for a Discount Tuesday to consider watching it opening night instead. Even opening on 1,750 screens, a fair number for an arthouse effort, Riley knew the grosses from the first few days would determine the picture’s immediate future and whether or not it would be pushed towards a wider audience or hasten its release to VOD.
During a robust Memorial Day weekend, the film opened eighth at the box office, narrowly edging out “Project Hail Mary,” a blockbuster from March on 500 fewer screens that had been available to rent or purchase digitally for two weeks. As of writing, the exact screen count of “Boosters” is not finalized, but if the similarly off-kilter, similarly underseen Black film “Is God Is” is any indication, it will likely get cut in half.
Box office numbers aren’t everything, obviously, but “I Love Boosters” feels so of the moment that failing to catch fire in the marketplace just doesn’t sit right with me.
Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer squatting in an abandoned chicken joint. Alongside her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), she is in a prolific and notorious ring of boosters called the Velvet Gang. They steal designer clothes from upscale shops and sell them for a fraction of their price at flea markets while drawing the ire of Christie Smith (Demi Moore), the biggest designer in the world. Smith is presented like a mash-up of Madonna and Steve Jobs, a brilliant art mind who sees fashion as a way to change the world — that’s why she’s Corvette’s hero. But then Smith calls the Velvet Gang “low-class urban bitches” and sets off a chain reaction that grows into something bigger than anyone involved could have foreseen.
“I Love Boosters” is one of the more fascinating and thematically intricate crime films in recent memory. It is a movie principally focused around the concept of theft, but it explicitly traces lines between multiple levels of thievery. Initially, we see the obvious theft in the way the boosters steal the physical goods made by fashion designers, but then focus shifts to the intellectual property infractions Smith makes when she begins to sell a dress copying one of Corvette’s designs. But as the Velvet Gang gets jobs at one of Smith’s Metro Design shops to hit her where it hurts, the entire affair brushes up against the grandest heist of them all: stolen labor.
One of the Metro Design employees, Violeta (Eiza González), turns out to be an organizer, and a rival booster, Jianhu (Poppy Liu), is actually a Chinese factory worker out for revenge on Smith. Both women and their comrades are the victims of predatory working conditions on the supply chain and retail sales ends of Smith’s textile empire. Each wants to topple her regime and secure better positions for their respective groups, but Corvette is initially reluctant for them all to team up. She sees each of their issues with Smith as unique vendettas that must be pursued individually, only caring about the specific bits of overlap those agendas share.
But the beauty in “Boosters” is how magnificently it illustrates the sum total of these gripes as one multipronged struggle that can only be overcome through solidarity and collective bargaining amongst the aggrieved. Riley’s debut feature, “Sorry To Bother You,” was immediately beloved among left-leaning cinephiles for its politics, but at the time of its release, I found it lacking in resonance beyond my strong connection to its espoused ideals. It’s a funny movie with a charming style, but I didn’t connect with it on a more visceral level. For my money, “Boosters” is an improvement upon that film in every conceivable way, going both bigger and bolder while more effectively weaving its themes and messaging into its larger narrative.
Just like “Bother,” “Boosters” finds Riley making a playground of the real world. Employing absurdist imagery and surrealist framing, he creates a colorful, brash, and heightened world that’s as captivating as it is immersive. When Mariah has to fill in for the gang’s white female decoy, she points out that she can’t do “white,” but she can do the next best thing, before holding her breath so hard she transforms into biracial comedienne Robin Thede in order to distract the shop’s cashiers. After Corvette repeatedly runs into LaKeith Stanfield’s Pinky Ring Guy, a potential love interest with a reputation for being a toxic lothario with preternatural oral sex skills, he is revealed to be a “literal demon,” complete with horror movie makeup effects.
The storytelling takes even basic expositional transitions as opportunities for quirky experimentation. The narrative requires multiple characters to tell one another back story and crucial plot information, and these bits are delivered with artful exuberance. Jianhu telling the rest of the cast about what the factory workers endure prompts a white screen to appear on her forehead as the tale she spins projects on her face like in a movie auditorium. The film’s visual identity is dense with ideas and concepts, but delivered with a fluffy kind of execution that makes it feel cozy and comforting.
All that is by design, it seems, to use aesthetics and cinematic technique to make the film’s pleas to recognize our collective plights palatable. In the real world, whenever people start using terms like “dialectical materialism,” even folks who could readily benefit from understanding it tune out. But from the mind of a filmmaker who identifies as a communist, “I Love Boosters” uses art and drama to radicalize as many viewers as he can possibly reach.
That’s what makes its disappointing box office results such a bummer. It isn’t like when denizens of some pop star’s fandom lament a lack of streaming support for their fave, losing a war against some other pop star’s diametrically opposed sycophants. This project is a labor of love meant to help heal all those who have had their labor stolen. As time passes, it’ll become a cult classic and beloved by many, but it’s hard not to see this missed opportunity for a watershed moment now and not in a theoretical future.
But perhaps there’s another way of looking at it: “I Love Boosters” exists. It is a movie that got made, got funded, and released on a wider scale than many similarly ambitious films of its ilk in the recent past. I impatiently lament that it might take years for audiences to catch up to its splendor, but that’s overlooking that it’ll be here for them to discover late in the first place.
Riley’s last creative endeavor, the similarly political television series “I’m a Virgo,” was bankrolled by Amazon, where it currently sits waiting to be streamed alongside shows like “Bosch” and “The Boys.” “Boosters” has the backing of Annapurna Pictures, the pet production company founded by Megan Ellison — yes, of the same Ellison family so aligned with the current kleptocracy they’re about to swallow one of the oldest movie studios whole.
A lot of people on the left have criticized this. But when we say a movie cost $20 million, that money doesn’t just disappear. It goes from the bank accounts of people like Ellison into those of the various artists and craftspeople involved in a movie. So, maybe the real beauty is that Riley is boosting from some of the most powerful forces in media in order to tell his singular, crucial stories to us. If not enough of us saw it opening weekend, there will still be time to catch up.
“I Love Boosters” is currently playing exclusively in theaters.