Meet I Love Boosters provocateur Boots Riley, a man of many hats

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The thing about Boots Riley? You tend to see his style before you actually see him. Arriving in one of his trademark, ludicrously capacious hats, Riley’s bright clothing and oversized headgear announces his presence before you lay eyes on the Oakland-based director, musician and former political organizer.

“I have one suitcase that I can fit four hats into,” Riley says.

It’s a sentiment that encapsulates the ethos of his much anticipated second feature film, I Love Boosters. A visually delirious and narratively frenetic escapade rooted in ideas of working-class resistance and the redistribution of capital in the age of overconsumption, the film follows Corvette (Keke Palmer), an aspiring fashion designer and member of a Bay Area shoplifting crew dubbed the Velvet Gang by the media.

Paired with Riley’s signature approach – surreal spectacle married to political urgency; maximalist aesthetics deployed in service of a leftist critique – it’s an exciting, if sometimes scattered, vision that unfolds onscreen with an incredible amount of energy and exuberance, one worth understanding on Riley’s own terms. Ahead of the film’s release this Friday, Riley shares the thinking behind his ambitious approach to telling stories of collective organized resistance.

Boots Riley gets caught red-handed with the exciting but clumsy satire I Love Boosters

Boosters have such an interesting role in the ecosystem of the fashion market in terms of their redistribution of different forms of capital. Can you talk about your choice to centre them in the film?

I was thinking about people that I worked with as a broke artist who wanted to stay fashionable on stage – people who have been important to me and our community. Boosters are like the ice cream truck coming through the neighborhood with all of these things – household goods, electronics, designer fashion – those fashions often being inspired by those same people from those neighbourhoods.

I also went through a period of time where I decided that the details of my life were secondary to my work – like what I was wearing, it didn’t matter. It was a really depressing place to be in, so I decided that I wanted to actively connect to the details and the textures of things. And as I did that, I also started thinking about the stuff that things are made of – as in, things are made of things, but they’re also made of people’s time. And I was thinking about that in relation to boosters, who are really just part of fashion’s distribution chain.

What is the role of playfulness and the absurd for you as an artist attempting to politically mobilize your audience?

When I first joined a radical party – a revolutionary party, a communist party – in the eighties, there were a lot of people there that were in their 70s and 60s who had been radical since their 20s. And, for many of them, one of the reasons they were still around is partly because they were also really good organizers who taught others using humour. When you talk about jokes in the sense of a political analysis, you’re talking about pointing out what the contradictions and ironies of the world are. And the more effective you are at that, sometimes the more ridiculous it seems.

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What is the relationship between visual style or aesthetics and political function for you as a filmmaker?

I’m trying to make people engage with my work in a different way than they normally might engage with film. I want to use textures and colours in an almost collage-like fashion, as well as incorporate the rhythms that I’ve learned from music. I want those aspects to make your heart speed up – to cause visceral reactions that are in some way analogous to the emotions that the characters are having.

I’m also fine with people seeing the seams of the work, because I want people to know this is something that has been actively made. I think it causes a different sort of engagement – one that is less automatic.

Your films often foreground performance, artificiality and a heightened sense of formalism in these very self-conscious ways – you play a lot with transfiguring one known thing into another, as well as upending established tone and mode. What inspires that aspect of your work?

My grandmother ran the Oakland Ensemble Theatre when I was younger. To me, I was very allergic to black box theatre – that was “grown up stuff” that I thought was corny at the time. When it came time to work on I Love Boosters, I thought “Okay, what if it’s black box theatre? What would it take for me to make that interesting to me?”

The aesthetic choices in the film, they’re not totally black box, but they borrow from it. All of the artifice of the film was me thinking about how I could incorporate those aspects I felt were necessary in order to create a different kind of artifice that you can see and feel.

I was trying to figure out how to push myself even further as a filmmaker – to do things I’ve never seen done before and also to push myself to do things that were against my rules. There’s things you’re not supposed to do as a filmmaker, and the question for me is, how do I do those things while still making it interesting?

So much of your storytelling returns to the body as this site of disruption and destabilization, not just in terms of the withholding of labour as a political tactic, but the transformation of the body into these monstrous or othered forms. Can you share your thinking behind those choices?

I’m going to be very honest here… When my first child was born, it was a C-section birth. I saw inside my then-wife’s body and it shook me to my core. Not because of the blood and everything, but because it showed me how fragile everything is – how thin of a material there is between life and death. I’m seeing this while holding this new life in my hands – one of the most joyous experiences I ever had that connected me to my past and future. It felt so right, but also terrified me to the point of thinking about life in a very detailed way – in a very appreciative way.

I think that bringing things to a physical place like that can have a huge effect on what art can make people think about themselves. With that aspect of Sorry to Bother You, for example, it became clear that that character needed to be faced with a mortal fear – not just death; that’s not enough. The idea that who we are – who we could be, who we don’t want to be – is a lot more scary. And I want to bring these ideas into my work because, for me, they also connect us to who we would like to be. And what I then try to do is connect that to an optimism about the future.