I Love Boosters

Few films arrive wearing as much visual flair as Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters. A splurge of colour, audacious costume and playful typography gives this fashion satire an unmistakable visual identity. 

It’s a visual sugar rush; the kind of film you could daydream about for days. The story, sadly, leaves a fainter impression.

Keke Palmer plays Corvette, an aspiring designer who runs the ‘Velvet Gang’ with Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige). The trio shoplift from Metro Designers, a luxury clothing chain run by Christie Smith (Demi Moore). When Corvette spots her own design in the shop, being sold by the woman at the top, the theft becomes personal. Who gets labelled a visionary, and who gets branded as the thief?

That question gives Riley’s leftist satire its bite. Beneath the polished surfaces of luxury retail, underpaid workers’ voices are muffled by pounding music. Across branches, a vacuum device sucks the racks bare and sends them to China, where the factory workers who made the garments protest. The film blurs the line between criminality and capitalism, exposing an industry that profits from the very exploitation it hides behind the racks.

Whatever you make of the story, the fashion sweeps the board as the main event. Shirley Kurata’s costumes are expressive enough to steal scenes, while the colour-coded store interiors and graphic titles give the film the feel of a mood board let loose. Almost every frame feels like a page torn from an eccentric fashion magazine. Even the shoplifted pieces hung in Corvette’s room look carefully styled.

It’s a visual sugar rush, but the story leaves a fainter impression

In classic Riley fashion, the bizarre soon makes itself at home, from skin-shedding suits to a sexually grotesque demon and a transmutational device.

The trouble is that the storyline rarely keeps up. For all its surreal detours, the film settles into a familiar conflict between righteous underdogs and a cartoonishly cruel mogul. The jokes, too, are less memorable than the visual gags and costumes surrounding them. Riley’s world is full of strange, unpredictable possibilities, yet its underlying moral conflict can feel surprisingly straightforward. A satire interested in the system of exploitation deserves more than something that seems closer to a Disney-like storyline. Sure, its light-hearted route into serious issues may win many over, but I couldn’t get past the clichés.

I Love Boosters is a racetrack of pure invention, with enough colour and nerve to keep you hooked. But for all its imaginative flair, the story sometimes struggles to keep up.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Oct 30.