A booster is a person who jacks from the retail/ And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale
– “I Love Boosters!,” The Coup
If we have learned anything from Coup frontman Boots Riley’s brief-but-bananapants filmography, it’s that he loves Marx, Surrealism, and Oakland. As in his still-amazing debut Sorry to Bother You, he staples all three together in his second feature, the chaotic, often very funny I Love Boosters, opening night film of this year’s South by Southwest Film & TV Festival.
Based loosely on the Coup song of the same name, Corvette (Keke Palmer) leads the Velvet Gang, a colorful (literally – the costuming and set design is gloriously eye-popping) crew of street fashionistas who knock over East Bay designer stores then resell the items to locals at a fraction of the cost.
Corvette wants to design clothing herself, but feels locked out of the industry. It doesn’t help that she and her crew Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) are squatting in a closed fried chicken franchise. To that end, the gals decide to jack from boutiques owned by Christie Smith (Demi Moore), an ultra-high-end designer who talks shit about the “low-class urban bitches” who steal the expensive clothing and sell it to, you know, poor people. She’s the sort of exploitative capitalist who would seem cartoonish if America wasn’t littered with them right this second. (A few tweaks and this movie could absolutely be about the AI revolution the tech side of SXSW seems determined to push.)
The Velvet Gang tries to do it from the inside by working at one of her stores (Will Poulter needs to play an annoying retail manager more often). But their plan is inadvertently scotched by an enraged Chinese worker named Jianhu (Poppy Liu) who comes armed with a teleporter that makes extremely short work of the clothing. Turns out that the workers who make the clothes for pennies on the dollar have common cause with the ladies who liberate the goods from their final destination on the back of the rich. That’s praxis, baby!
Increasingly nuts ideas come fast and furiously (Corvette’s debt load manifests as a giant boulder of bills, the building that houses Smith’s office sits at an impossible angle to the street), and a few subplots wander in and out, including one about a smooth operator (LaKeith Stanfield) with a very particular sexual skillset and a heavily made-up Don Cheadle as a local hustler with a pyramid scheme in the offing. These strands don’t add up to much besides crowd-pleasing gags but it’s also hard to get too upset because Riley keeps everything moving at a let’s-call-it-vigorous pace. What’s most striking is Riley’s optimism; for a guy whose work can feel apocalyptic, he maintains an inspired belief in the power of community and the contradictory realities of life under extreme capitalism. Which is to say, nobody can blame you for wanting to look fly, but also: Viva la revolución!
I Love Boosters will be released in theatres May 22.
