I Love Boosters review: Boots Riley delivers an exciting but clumsy satire

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I Love Boosters

Written and directed by Boots Riley

Starring Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige

Classification 14A; 105 minutes

Opens in theatres May 22

Having watched the anti-capitalist fever dream that is Boots Riley’s second feature, I Love Boosters twice now, I’m reminded of the sense of deep alienation that comes with seemingly being one of the few people not to excitedly hop on board a film’s bandwagon of praise.

What’s most obvious about I Love Boosters – and former labour organizer and artistic multihyphenate Riley’s work overall – is that his frenetic, often absurd centring of working-class liberation is an undoubtedly celebratory project on paper. Riley is trying so vocally, so visibly to make inspiring – if not mobilizing – politically informed art that to draw attention to his failures in doing so makes one feel like a spoilsport, an ideological Negative Nancy on the sidelines of the so-called revolution pointing out issues of semantics.

But what kind of revolution is Riley offering in I Love Boosters? His sophomore feature, which follows the critical success of his 2018 film Sorry to Bother You, centres on a group of San Francisco Bay Area boosters led by aspiring designer Corvette (Keke Palmer, charismatic as ever). The group, dubbed by the media as the Velvet Gang, is particularly fond of boosting from local Metro Designs boutiques – a high-concept luxury label headed up by despotic designer and biotech savant Christie Smith (Demi Moore).

Review: Sorry to Bother You is a furious wake-up call from Boots Riley

When the microaggression-loving Smith steals one of Corvette’s original designs, what started as shoplifting as a means to get by erupts into a breakneck, absurdist series of events that runs the gamut of everything from a prosthetic-laden Don Cheadle as Dr. Jack (the cult-ish leader of what is clearly a Ponzi scheme preys on the isolation of the everyday worker) to a liberal think-tank undertaking a bizarre psyop against the American public (involving gun-wielding claymation agents of disinformation, of course). All of this intertwined with Metro Designs factory workers in China engaged in their own fight against the systemic exploitation of their employer? It’s a lot to chew on.

Replete with sharp one-liners and incredibly fun and absurdist visual gags – in one scene, Corvette stuffs clothes inside her tracksuit to the point of inflating to twice her size and comedically wobble-runs away from the store; during another boost, her friend Mariah (Taylour Paige, notably underutilized) is able to hold her breath and transform from her brown-skinned self into a light-skinned Black woman to try to evade detection by colourist saleswomen – I Love Boosters evokes much of the fresh, socially informed comedy of Sorry to Bother You with glee.

The surrealism of the film’s humour is only bolstered by its kaleidoscopic visual maximalism – outsized spectacle and vibrant, monochromatic costume and production design are privileged here, creating a world of aesthetic excess where bodies, cinematic modes and the presupposed limits of worlds distend, rupture and transform without warning. This tonal alchemist tendency is one of Riley’s best instincts as a filmmaker (and much of what made Sorry to Bother You such a hit with audiences and critics) and what will most excite viewers.

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But strip away its brightly executed, Marxism-meets-Cocomelon veneer and I Love Boosters feels glaringly underdeveloped. The tools and methods of Riley’s joyful absurdity also cover for a glaring degree of narrative shallowness – the woefully underserved relationship between Corvette and Sade (Naomi Ackie) especially, wherein, amidst Corvette’s drive for revenge against Smith, Sade instead insists on the need for profit in the name of survival.

It’s a lifelong friendship between two precariously classed Black women who are inherently positioned within the fashion market ecosystem as not just creators who have been extracted from but also as disruptors and redistributors of capital. Yet neither of these crucial aspects of their characters seem to have been given much consideration beyond a light drafting of their main conflict, social position as boosters and half-cooked overtures toward the Velvet Gang’s (re)orientation toward community care.

One of Riley’s most brilliant narrative instruments – a Marxist-informed device capable of not only teleporting people and objects through space but also distilling them down to their essential, contradictory elements – is also his most abysmally used. Despite a truly whiplash explanation of its fantastical roots in dialectical materialism, Riley’s use of the device – in effect, a means of making material a globalized labour movement – also attempts to conveniently close the gaps of Riley’s noticeable lazy scripting. It initiates a series of heavy-handed, far too easy dei ex machina that trade in the novelty, if not incredulity, of the gag itself rather than galvanizing the story world with newfound narrative complexity.

It’s a crucial turning point in which the humour of the film transfigures from its previously just healthy enough doses of politically informed critique to a kind of chaotic, piecemeal silliness. Crucial plot points are clumsily if not incoherently brought to a close, narrative logic is stunted beyond even the bounds of the film’s surrealist tendencies and some of the more ridiculous elements (such as LaKeith Stanfield’s catalogue-model-by-day, sex-chasing-demon-by-night character) remain disjointed in the story world instead of thoughtfully incorporated.

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Rather than a radical freneticism coyly underscoring the interconnectivity of Riley’s narrative threads, I Love Boosters offers an accumulating cascade of absurdities that seems designed to sweep audiences up into its undoubtedly thrilling energy without second thought. It’s a farcical blur of a final act that underserves itself in its refusal to engage with its own thinking with any sort of rigour, offering up instead an onslaught of ideas that are simultaneously too much and also not enough.

Given the film’s obvious political project, it is also deeply underwhelming that collective resistance to exploitation is simultaneously rendered here in ways both too didactic and all too easy – a “happy ending” of sorts that treats the politics underscoring its story as a basic arithmetic to be directly translated onscreen in its most reductive forms (rather than thoughtfully explored through the mazework of contradictions it attempts to bring forth).

It’s an utter joyride of visual spectacle that serves up undercooked utopic resistance – one that is hampered by its drive to bounce from one scattered idea to the next, prioritizing the novelty of naming its politics over any actual depth of insight or integration of them.

There’s a refrain that Corvette returns to often during scenes of conflict in the film: “Now is not that time for nuance.” It’s a particularly damning line when set in relief to Riley’s impoverished execution of his incredible wealth of ideas. While a thrilling watch at many moments, there is also an overwhelming sense that politics and characters of I Love Boosters are struggling to find their full expression against the weight of the film’s undeniably spirited ambition.

Special to The Globe and Mail