The Boston International Film Festival (IFF) recently opened with “I Love Boosters,” a bombastic, vibrant new film by director Boots Riley. The film follows the exploits of the Velvet Gang, a crew of shoplifters (or “boosters”) who rob high-end Bay Area designer clothing stores to resell goods at a deep discount. The outfits they boost are prohibitively expensive, yet made by underpaid foreign labourers: a production model designed to squeeze the most profit out of the masses.
The ringleader is Corvette, played by the incomparable Keke Palmer. Haunted by overdue bills, squatting in a chicken restaurant, living off of candy and plagued by loneliness, the character initially longs to infiltrate the world of billionaire fashion maven Christie Smith (played by Demi Moore). Corvette submits one of her clothing designs to a contest run by Metro Designs, a fast fashion derivative of Christie’s haute couture brand, with no real expectation of winning the competition. It’s implied her parents have passed; she clashes with her best friend; she has mixed feelings about a local womanizer, hilariously played by LaKeith Stanfield.
Absurd visual gags build up a surreal, dysfunctional portrait of modern life. Like many young Americans, Corvette feels alienated, isolated, and rudderless. However, after developing a vendetta against Christie, she develops solidarity with the staff of Metro Designs, Chinese factory workers, and her own frustrated friend group.
“I Love Boosters” represents not simply a critique of the fashion industry, but an outright rejection of capitalism altogether. “In case you couldn’t tell from the film, I’m a communist,” director Riley announced to the IFF audience. “We need a world in which the people democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor.”
Before making movies, Riley had his start in music, founding the political hip-hop group The Coup. He told the IFF audience that when he entered film, he wanted to transfer the “instincts” he had accumulated over 20 years of music. The multidisciplinary artist said, “I try to steal from other mediums as opposed to just from cinema.”
Riley edits and structures films in a manner comparable to songs, relying on an intuitive understanding of rhythms. He cited Parliament Funkadelic as a major influence on his choices: What’s the visual version of that? he asks himself while listening to music. His films are saturated with so many layers of references, that Riley confesses he has trouble identifying them after the fact. For “I Love Boosters,” he recalled sources of inspiration such as “Looney Tunes, Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, [and] Cinderella.”
One scene, in which Christie suggests a turquoise top is actually aquamarine, feels like an obvious reference to the iconic cerulean sweater scene from “The Devil Wears Prada.” Except that Boots Riley informed me that he hadn’t seen that movie when he conceived of said turquoise scene. The coincidence is striking, not simply because of the similar colors, but because “I Love Boosters” feels, at times, like an ideological response to the top-down view of fashion presented in “The Devil.” In the latter film, fashion is exclusive: something conceived in small rooms by a select few, defined by prestigious fashion houses, trickling down to the masses. In Riley’s film, fashion is produced by the people: Christie poaches from the creativity of the Black community, and rips off the Chinese factory workers who churn out her fast-fashion lines.
While the Velvet Gang are thieves in a legal sense, the film likewise suggests that the biggest thief of all is the corporation: an entity that exploits the innovations and labour of the working class. This parallels criticisms levelled against luxury brands in real life, with high fashion frequently borrowing designs, symbolism, and textiles from marginalized populations, without compensation or recognition. Styles from indigenous Mexican, Indian, Chinese, and African populations are famously ripped off by brands including Ralph Lauren, Prada, Louis Vuitton, and Dior. Before arriving on runways, streetwear fashion from Black and brown American communities was derided as ghetto. The “clean girl” aesthetic is the latest iteration of this trend, with social media users crediting Hailey Bieber for inventing the slick bun, minimal makeup, neutral nail polish look originally pioneered by Black women. All that while sweatshops are notorious for their abusive and hazardous work conditions.
Riley uses his films to advocate for “a mass, militant, radical labor movement.” His social consciousness developed early, having joined the Progressive Labor Party at age 15. When The Coup released its second album through a major label, the 24-year-old artist had a “midlife crisis.” Convinced that music was trivial compared to political organizing, he wondered whether he was “wasting his life.” So, he quit the industry to help lead an organization called the Young Comrades. Recognizing how profoundly his peers were influenced by songs, TV, and films in their decision-making, Riley eventually began to realize the power of the field he’d left behind. When the organization imploded, he recommitted to the arts. He refers to his previous film, “Sorry to Bother You,” as the “most effective piece of culture” he’s ever made, as far as radicalizing movie watchers.
An audience member asked Riley about his Jewish roots, given that his grandmother was a Russian-Jewish refugee who escaped the Nazis. The filmmaker responded that most Jews he’d known in his youth were communists, and speculated that the community had wound up moving in a more nationalistic direction. “There used to be a […] stereotype, manufactured caricature that ‘all Jews are communists,’ right? And I want us to get back to that character,” he told the audience, inciting laughter. He added that the Jewish culture he’d grown up with strove to create a world in which genocides could never happen again. “Unfortunately, it has started to happen again, and it’s going on,” Riley concluded.
With his unabashedly leftist views and activist roots, some fans have been vaguely surprised that Riley manages to secure industry funding for his lush, candy-coloured, cacophonous movies. For “I Love Boosters,” DP Natasha Braier used custom Panavision hybrid lenses, as well as a special glass element to produce flares and colour washes. The result is a fever dream of kaleidoscopic visuals, stunning outfits, and eye-popping set design. “I have ideas that take a lot of resources to make,” the director acknowledged.
One audience member pointed out that, with a low-budget indie film, Riley might be freed up to explore increasingly transgressive, radical content. The director countered that such transgressive films haven’t received wide releases, saying that “my main thing is, I want people to see it.” By working within the system, screening films at thousands of theatres, and opting for Neon as a distributor, he strives to ensure his messaging reaches the general public. “If you make a commune in the woods, you’re still in capitalism,” he explained. “Even insofar that you’ve taken people away from it that could be fighting right now.”
As critics have pointed out, subtlety is not Riley’s strong point; it may not be an end goal for him at all. Part of the plot of “I Love Boosters” revolves around a sci-fi gadget, which functions as an excuse for Riley to explain the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism to the general public. His ending is so blatant in its socialist optimism that it could easily be interpreted as preachy or saccharine. Then again, current events are bleak enough to induce dread, hopelessness, and indifference in public discourse. Perhaps it is not such a terrible thing to imagine that the inevitable outcome of inequity might be liberation, rather than a fascist takeover or an AI-dystopia.
“I Love Boosters”is slated to have a wide theatrical release in Boston on May 22. “I need you to post about it as many times as you can before your parents call you and ask if you’re okay,” Riley told the IFF audience, suggesting that friend groups dress monochromatically to attend his screenings. The director later attended an afterparty to speak with several audience members, many of whom were dressed in elaborate outfits: fur coats, bright makeup, and bling. With the demands of work leaving dwindling time for artistic pursuits, fashion is one of the remaining avenues for ordinary people to express themselves.
In one scene, Christie insists to her assistant that people are her canvas, only to have the assistant rebut that people don’t want to be canvases—they want to be artists.
