‘I Love Boosters’ Review: Boots Riley’s Dressed to Excess Cartoon Revolution is Too Much and Not Enough [B-] SXSW

There’s often a romanticization of “breaking the rules” in filmmaking. It’s laudable when filmmakers color outside the lines and refuse to conform to typical standards you come to expect of filmmaking, whether in writing, design, or overall form. Boots Riley is a writer and director who seems never to have been made aware that a rulebook ever existed, directing his films with an unbridled, unregulated mentality, in which every stray idea, no matter how outlandish or detached from the core narrative, makes it to the screen. 

Such was the case with his 2018 debut, Sorry To Bother You, which flipped a satire about Black code-switching in the workplace into a bizarre body-horror black comedy in the eleventh hour. Riley parlayed this into his underseen mini-series, I’m A Virgo in 2023, but crystallizes his artistic ethos to a greater degree with his latest feature, and the opening night film at this year’s SXSW, I Love Boosters. That’s to say that I Love Boosters certifies Riley as a distinct stylist, for better or worse, as his new film embraces the familiar cleverness, indulgences, and deficiencies that have populated his work thus far. 

Ostensibly, I Love Boosters is a scrappy and irreverent drama about the group of titular “boosters,” The Velvet Gang. This trio of women, led by the resolute Corvette (Keke Palmer), steals expensive clothes from luxury brands and flips them, selling them to the community at a lower price. The core hook is that these girls end up targeting famed fashion designer Christine Smith (Demi Moore), setting up a low-level heist movie where the central trio, rounded out by Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), take advantage of new jobs taken up at one of her retail stores and rob the entirety of the building. If you know anything about Boots Riley, you’ll know he winds his way through plenty of absurdist digressions in the process.

I Love Boosters is a lot of movie. Specifically, it’s a lot of movie genres: heist comedy; deadpan satire; absurdist freakout; sci-fi action; stop-motion slapstick; all coated with the type of anti-capitalist, pro-worker political critique Riley is known for. It’s Dr. Seuss and Looney Tunes, it’s Wes Anderson and Joe Dante. It’s often invigorating and strenuous at the same time, constantly introducing a new novel concept or deranged, inspired image, often failing to reconcile its go-go-go attitude with the nuances of the socio-economic themes at its center, or even the emotional interiority of its characters. In choosing to go all big, all the time, I Love Boosters abandons its center of thematic gravity in favor of cartoon anarchy. 

But when you throw everything at the wall, you tend to get a few things that stick. In navigating his fantastical bizarro world, where it seems anything is possible, you don’t get the sense that the insanity is necessarily reflective of the lunacy of our own reality, but more so a sandbox full of toys that the film continually smashes together in abrasive glee. There’s an occasional giddiness to that — it’s not often you watch a film where it’s nigh impossible to predict what could possibly happen at any given moment. Eventually, you begin to wish you had some kind of handle on Riley’s universe. 

It starts modestly enough, as Corvette, Mariah, and Sade formulate their heist at the MetroDesigner shop where they’ve taken up professional residence, defined by a monochromatic color scheme of the clothes and interiors that’s changed monthly; the employees adapt to this too, including a jaded Eiza González and a flamboyant corporate bootlicker played with amusing exaggeration by a quite funny Will Poulter. They help round out the outer edges of this accretive ensemble, as does Poppy Liu as Jianpu, who represents the film’s expansion of both its narrative and stylistic horizons. I Love Boosters opens up to include the narratives of underpaid, overworked factory workers doing the hard labor of crafting Christine Smith pieces overseas; meanwhile, The Velvet Gang is playing with the fabric of space and time and uncovering ludicrous conspiracies that speak to a greater friction between capital and labor. 

Typically, it’s the elements of design that are pushing I Love Boosters into its most gratifying moments. Riley allows the art department to luxuriate in their greatest whims — every piece of the world is extravagant and excessive in ways that can only be truly realized by talented craftspeople. This is a world that sees Moore’s character living in a giant, leaning skyscraper, her entire apartment set at a 45-degree angle with beguiling decadence. It’s a film of elaborate attire: loud, bright, art-piece fashion that the characters inhabit and build their lives around, all of it melding with the life and color of the production design. Production designer Christopher Glass and costume designer Shirley Kurata craft the details of a film that is never boring to look at. It refutes the notion that modern film is necessarily bereft of visual personality or flair. 

And yet. For as much fun as I Love Boosters is to look at, it’s equally difficult to really get a lock on, as it’s constantly, frivolously moving on to the next thing, from suctioning up retail stores with a magic bag one minute to squaring off against futuristic police cyborgs the next. To that end, it’s also noncommittal about exploring the totality of its themes or characters. Just look at LaKeith Stanfield, who’s really only here to serve as an off-the-wall, fantastical punchline midway through the film. Or consider the film’s core concept of the boosters, who steal from the rich to give to the poor… except they’re typically not giving to the poor, they’re selling. Even at discounted rates, Riley doesn’t fully explore this aspect of community-building as it relates to capitalist enterprises and the necessity of making money, a notable omission for a filmmaker who prides himself on his refined political stances, especially as it pertains to the working class. 

The film becomes more focused on a broader idea of global collective working-class action, in which labor solidarity crosses borders as people act together within a larger, unified ecosystem. That I Love Boosters is specifically about fashion is keen, as the industry sits at an obvious nexus of egalitarian utility and artistic expression, turned into cloistered expressions of luxury for the rich. That’s an admirable thematic crux, but its clarity comes too late in a ride full of flippant digressions from a filmmaker constantly distracted by every notion pulling his brain in new directions. I Love Boosters is bursting with imaginative energy, while also proving that a movie that has no hesitation to scrap any baseline sense of grounding leaves you adrift amid the havoc. Maybe that’s somewhat true to life, but it remains a frustratingly unmooring experience.

Grade: B-

This review is from the 2026 SXSW Film Festival. NEON will open I Love Boosters in theaters nationwide May 22.