I Love Boosters Film Review: Fashion Frenzy

Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters guides energized performances through a highly entertaining, creatively unhinged skewering of today’s world.

But what is a booster in this movie’s context? Well, it’s someone who shoplifts goods from a store and sells them to the masses on the cheap. Corvette (Keke Palmer, of One of Them Days) is an aspiring fashion designer in Oakland, California who takes to “boosting” clothes after failing to make it in the fashion industry herself. Joined by fellow boosters Sade (Naomi Ackie, of Mickey 17) and Mariah (Taylour Paige, of The Toxic Avenger), their main target is Metro Designer and its exalted head Christie Smith (Demi Moore, of The Substance), who has essentially stolen the designs of less privileged artists like Corvette for her own profits.

What starts as the usual booster routine is interrupted, however, when a Metro Designer factory worker from China (Poppy Liu, of Dog Man) arrives on the scene with… well, all I’ll say is that I Love Boosters is partially a sci-fi movie. I wasn’t even too surprised by that point. From there, the ambitions of Corvette’s crew expand to not just humiliating Smith, but making a sweeping statement that could potentially kickstart a workers’ revolution.

To paraphrase Stefon from Saturday Night Live, I Love Boosters has everything: giant balls of financial papers rolling down streets, pseudo time travel, demons who eat people’s souls by eating them out, Will Poulter (of Warfare), and anything that Boots Riley’s mind came up with and had him going, “Yeah, I can somehow work that in here.” All to the tune of raging trombones and wacky slide whistles courtesy of composers Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner. The level of crazy that Sorry to Bother You climaxed with is this movie’s starting point. 

As you should assume by now, this is a very flexible reality where everyone’s core sentiments are grounded in our world but the rules are not. I Love Boosters is blatantly anti-capitalist, saying the quiet parts loud and the loud parts through a megaphone the size of a jet. In less capable hands, being such an obvious mouthpiece for the writer’s opinions could have come across as pretentious pandering to an echo chamber. But Boots Riley’s biggest creative strength is getting away with everything by making his commentary fun, funny, imaginative, and woven into the core of the world and story. 

One of the best gags in the movie is Christie Smith’s headquarters being built at an angle that she’s learned to walk through with ease but trips up everyone else serving her. It makes for a visually engaging set piece, a source of comedy, and a metaphor for how subordinates feel keeping up with their superior all in one. Another favorite joke of mine involves the idea that grifters who speak vehemently against their best interests are all essentially assimilating into the same people. I will give you $10 if you correctly guess how that’s ultimately visualized.

Tons of small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them jokes are scattered in almost every scene. I’m confident I did in fact miss a lot of them, but the ones you catch will likely get laughs as well. Even the way our protagonists’ home is laid out and decorated tells you a lot about how they live and what they value in life. Editors Matthew Hannam and Terel Gibson are largely to thank for reeling in all these fly-by moments and keeping a firm handle on the film’s extreme energy. Something new is thrown at you nearly all the time, but the film never comes across as messy or lost in its own chaos.

But what gives I Love Boosters its real heart and soul are the characters walking through that chaos. This is probably Keke Palmer’s best performance. You can see why Corvette has resorted to her somewhat cutthroat ways of getting by, but her ideas of how to take things further clash with her friends’, tearing her between personal gratification and actually making meaningful change. She, Ackie, Paige, and eventually Liu react to their insane surroundings with equally energized but far more rational writing, which sees them taking a scalpel to the events before them as much as it sees them just trying to make any damn sense of it all.

Eiza González, whom I wasn’t expecting to see right after watching her in In the Grey, is our anchor to the more head-scratching science fiction elements of the movie, including a literal plot device that I still can’t decide whether it’s brilliant, lazy, or both. Demi Moore is clearly just there to have fun hamming it up in her post-Substance life, playing a fashion icon that makes Miranda Priestly look like a joy to work for. LaKeith Stanfield (Die My Love) has some of the best laughs with his limited screen time as a mysterious love interest for Corvette. Though being objective, his character is mostly pointless in the grand scheme of things, which is a shame because I always look forward to Stanfield in anything.

The movie’s point isn’t just the been-there-done-that statement of capitalism = bad, although that’s clearly the end goal. Riley picks apart the ways in which everyone within the system operates and collaborates with one another, and how people are forced to follow those trappings even while trying to disrupt the system. There are literal walking contradictions everywhere that I Love Boosters spotlights, materializes into something tangible, and exaggerates to the nth degree. It comes to a rather optimistic conclusion that, while unrealistic in most other movies, can fly in this fantasy of an experience.

I Love Boosters is simultaneously an impressive spectacle and – not to trivialize anyone’s efforts – kind of cheap-looking. Some of that is for sure by design, with blatant models and stylized stop-motion that give off the vibe of someone playing with toys, which fits this world’s identity. But the cinematography seems to almost willingly obscure what would have been a cool stunt during a couple of chase sequences, or the chance of another big visual that isn’t really capitalized on. My only other technical concern – a rare one for me – is that the sound mixing frequently makes dialogue hard to hear, especially when the score picks up. It doesn’t get as bad as, say, Tenet, but it comes close.

There’s a lot to process with I Love Boosters, to a point where I’m still trying to wrap my head around everything it has to say and how each piece of the puzzle fits together. It’s mainly for that reason that I’m tepidly giving it 4 stars and not 4.5. Does that mean I recommend it any less? Absolutely not. If you can handle the strange and absurd, please go out and see it on the big screen. This is the kind of movie we desperately need more of; something that takes overly familiar themes and puts them through an unpredictable, original, memorably creative wringer. 

And considering how I was initially lukewarm on Sorry to Bother You before considering it one of the best films of the late 2010s, I’m willing to bet this film will grow on me even more over time as well. What else can I say except I love I Love Boosters and will boost it up to anyone who may feel the same.

I Love Boosters will be released in US theatres on May 22, 2026.