Movies & TV Boots Riley I Love Boosters Is Here to Remind Us That We Can (and Will) Build a Better Future And we can also look fabulous while doing it. By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on May 27, 2026 Image: NEON Comment 0 Share New Share Image: NEON If you’ve missed writer/director(/musician/producer/activist) Boots Riley on the big screen since 2018’s Sorry to Bother You, and could really use another reminder of the absurdity inherent in late-stage capitalism, never fear. I Love Boosters is here, and it is an absolute knockout. The title and basic premise of the film come from an eponymous track by Riley’s hip-hop group The Coup, released back in 2006. In case you weren’t aware of the term (and haven’t heard the song), “boosters” are people who steal from major clothing brands and resell the clothes to their communities at a much more affordable price. The film follows one booster crew in particular running out of San Francisco, called “The Velvet Gang,” known for boosting from Metro Designers, a brand run by Christie Smith (Demi Moore). The group is run by Corvette (Keke Palmer) with her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), plus their requisite white girl Stevie (Rachel Walters) used for distractions, and two occasional fellows for bigger jobs. Corvette is enamored of Smith, and wants to be a designer herself, having created her own pieces, one for a competition she never entered. Image: NEON Smith knows about the Velvet Gang and deliberately calls them out on her socials and the news as “low class, urban bitches” who can’t create and only know how to steal from others. When Corvette infiltrates Smith’s apartment building and meets her under false pretenses, she realizes that the woman is vapid and self-obsessed. She also hears about a set of $100,000 dollar suits Smith is in the process of making. So the Velvet Gang decide to get jobs working at a Metro Designer outpost (under the watchful, harried eye of Will Poulter’s Grayson) so that they can more easily clear the place out and stick it to… well, The Woman, in this case. Halfway into their tenure, Corvette sees one of her designs pop up at Metro, and the desire for revenge spikes to an all-consuming high. But there are other things happening on their periphery: Their Metro coworker Violeta (Eiza González) is trying to get the group to help her in unionizing efforts, and the day that the gang plans to hit their store, they’re outmaneuvered… by a young woman named Jianhu (Poppy Liu) with a magic bag. Okay, Jianhu doesn’t actually have a magic bag, but she does have a very cool device developed by her factory and the Chinese government that can do all sorts of things, including teleport her all the way from China, where she’s a sweatshop worker for Metro Designs. The device was intended to cut shipping costs, so Jianhu stole two of them with her coworker, and came to the U.S. to negate the free shipping and force the company to bargain fairly with their workers. Image: NEON Corvette just wants to get back at Smith. Sade wants to sell more merchandise to keep them afloat. Mariah feels that selling the clothes for cheap is a meaningful way to give back to their community. They strike a deal to rob every store in the Bay Area with Jianhu for a cut of the merchandise, but are eventually outgunned by Smith. That’s when Violeta steps in and gives them all a lesson in the devices they’re using. They can teleport, yes, but there are two more settings based in dialectical materialism: One is a “situational accelerator” that moves conflicts ahead to their inevitable apex, and the other is a “deconstructor” that takes things apart and back to the moment they’re created. It is the particular cross-section of philosophy, surrealism, interconnectedness, and humanism that makes Riley’s work on film so astute and so spectacularly vibrant, in an era where we’re in danger of losing the connections that keep our communities together. It’s also pointed that while both films focus on the same things—colorful and comedic sci-fi strangeness, worker’s rights, cult-of-personality CEOs and their inane businesses, how the wealthy dehumanize the poor and offer crumbs to gain access to their bodies and minds and labor, African American art and culture, capitalist absurdity—Sorry to Bother You is arguably a far darker tale than I Love Boosters manages to be. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I Love Boosters is not only hopeful, but frames collective liberation from tyranny and capitalistic might as an inevitability. It seems to me that there are two probable reasons for this: First, we’re nearly a decade removed from the prior film, and given how dour the world has become, we could all use a little uplifting. Two—and this is the important bit—I Love Boosters is a story about how women (and, very explicitly, women of color) do uprising and revolution. It is so much a story about that, in fact, that when a single romantic prospect pops up for one of our girls (being LaKeith Stanfield’s “Pinky Ring Guy” constantly trying to chat up Corvette), we not only veer away from him at every available opportunity, but also eventually find out that he is a literal demon. Is being a literal demon just a metaphor for being a complete waste of women’s hard-won time and effort? Very likely, but I can’t say I mind some literalism to counter the Manosphere messaging awaiting men in every cupboard of the internet. Image: NEON The film is laser focused on showing all the little hiccups dragging us down and away from each other. There’s men, sure, but Sade is also involved in a pyramid scheme that she’s certain will change their lives (for a small lump sum investment). Then there’s Corvette’s belief that revenge is going to make her feel better, and will somehow make up for what Christie Smith said about—and stole from—her. There’s the gang’s initial balk at the idea of helping others, like, say, your unionizing coworkers, when you could be getting your own. What’s refreshing about these issues is that no one is being shamed for their knee-jerk reactions to joining the movement and pushing for bigger change. It’s simply the conflicting needs and desires that keep people from coming together to create the unified power they’re searching for. If you’re waiting for that signature wrench that shocks the film’s (already shaky) realism like an ice bath, as the equisapiens of Sorry to Bother You did, never fear—you’ll get what you’re seeking. There are plenty of striking visuals on the way, both real and imagined, from Smith’s forty-five-degree tilt apartment floors to Corvette’s massive rolling ball of garbage that haunts her every action. The soundtrack is a powerhouse and the clothes and wigs and makeup are doing double duty in every frame. Moore’s Christie Smith is a related but different kind of monster than Armie Hammer’s Steve Lift and the WorryFree empire. She represents a kind of counterpoint to the Miranda Priestlys and girlboss antics the past two decades tried to feed us (ask me if I think it’s relevant that this film is premiering when the Devil Wears Prada sequel is still in theaters). Smith believes that she is imbuing the masses what they cannot create on their own, the chance to become part of a creative’s vision—namely, hers. It’s a scathing commentary on the way that even art has been coopted by capitalism, denying people their own right, and need, to create for themselves. Image: NEON But the most emotional moment of the film was truly unexpected on my end: As the heists amp up over the course of the film, Sade is constantly giving Corvette alternatives, different avenues, and comes back around to simply selling their lot if things stop working out. Corvette proceeds to get more and more irritated with her friend until, finally, Sade snaps—she’s tired of being told that she’s bringing everything down when all she’s been doing is offering options, and pivoting every second, and doing all she can to keep her best friend happy in the midst of her depression spiral. It’s a staggeringly real argument between two women about a very common woe, right in the middle of all the action. Sade needs to be heard, and (regardless of MLM vulnerability) deserves praise and support from the people she loves, too. Corvette spends the entire film learning that, regardless of how big everything feels, it can’t all be about her. In fact, it might feel less overwhelming if it weren’t. If this film is meant to serve as any kind of template or reminder, it’s around the fact that the road gets smoother when we’re all paving it together. To round it out, we get a spate of hilarious and utterly distracting cameos as well, from Don Cheadle to Viggo Mortensen to Eric André (this is the best one, just wait for it). There’s a fun tag scene where González continues to go off about temporal mechanics. While it feels like a bit of a cheat to use a sci-fi device to ease the world into collective action against billionaires (while looking fabulous), it’s also something of a gift. Managing this fight in real time means you experience the hardship along with the victory. Very often, you don’t wind up saving the Shire for yourself, as the saying goes. So watch I Love Boosters, and let yourself feel that jump right to the finale. Then get to work, as best you can.[end-mark] The post <i>I Love Boosters</i> Is Here to Remind Us That We Can (and Will) Build a Better Future appeared first on Reactor.