I Love Boosters
A special film from a filmmaker we ought to treasure.
No filmmaker in Hollywood understands exploitation like Boots Riley, Tinseltown’s lone open and life-long communist. A masterful improvement on his stellar maximalist and absurdist debut “Sorry to Bother You,” his sophomore feature “I Love Boosters” is a biting science-fiction satire set in the fashion industry that shows no sympathy for anyone in corporate power and culminates in global strikes that spread from country to country like COVID-19. It also happens to be the most original American wide release so far in 2026.
A group of Bay Area boosters—organized shoplifters who resell products at a more reasonable price—target Metro Designers, a fashion retail chain straight out of the Capitol in “Hunger Games”: everyone involved is an avatar of evil wearing painfully ostentatious clothes. The retail stores rotate bright, monochromatic looks monthly, and the employees’ mandated wardrobe comes out of their paychecks. Aided by a magical MacGuffin, the five women of the Velvet Gang, as the news labels them, unite to sabotage Metro Designers and its chief villain, Christie Smith (Demi Moore).
No plot description can prepare one for the non-stop insanity of “I Love Boosters.” A giant existential ball of debt chases one character, and a demon sucks the soul from another during oral sex. Low-income renters even insist they want to pay more in rent; the “handouts” are keeping them, they urge. Bolstering the absurd realities of Riley’s filmmaking is the conviction that the world we live in, where workers defend their own exploitation (duped by false consciousness, to use a Marxist term), is just as absurd.
Contemporary leftist filmmaking often has the reputation of pretension and abstraction, while also being documentarian (or realist) and boring; Riley flips these labels upside down. He repels the realist traditions of leftist filmmaking for hyper-stylized ludicrosity that has more in common visually with the advertisement-aesthetic maximalism of Edgar Wright and “Everything Everywhere All At Once” than one would initially suspect. He is always innovative and frequently radical. (His rap group The Coup’s first album was even titled “Kill My Landlord”). His latest is no departure from his lifelong creative endeavors. “I Love Boosters” is a special film from a filmmaker we ought to treasure—not just because of his artistic merits but because of the way he leverages his art to fight for a better world.
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