The new film I Love Boosters arrives as a loud, colorful rejoinder from writer‑director Boots Riley, whose debut feature won attention for its uncompromising satire. This second outing folds a heist plot into broad surrealism: a crew of young women in Oakland transform shoplifting into an act of survival and political statement, creating a collective that the media and corporate spokespeople call organized retail theft. The movie opens with kinetic scenes that establish tone and stakes, pairing sharp social commentary with buoyant, often absurd set pieces.
Riley stages the story around a small group led by Corvette (Keke Palmer), alongside Sadie (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), who dub themselves the Boosters. Their scheme—equal parts entrepreneurship, mutual aid and resistance—escalates when they collide with Christine Smith (Demi Moore), a fashion tycoon obsessed with monochrome boutiques. Along the way the ensemble encounters characters such as Violeta (Eiza González), factory workers fighting toxic processes, and a bizarre supernatural cameo that underlines the film’s taste for genre shifts. The narrative wants to be a comedy, a heist movie and political fable at once, and it rarely plays any one mode safe.
Plot and characters
At its core I Love Boosters is a heist picture that doubles as social drama. The Boosters move through designer stores, then redistribute goods at steep discounts to their community; they are alternately criminalized and romanticized by news cycles. Don Cheadle appears as a smooth schemer who models predatory social networks, while Will Poulter plays the local manager who enforces a brand’s rigid worker uniformity. Poppy Liu’s eccentric arrival changes the tone late in the film, and LaKeith Stanfield turns up as an unhinged, Prince‑like figure whose scene becomes one of the film’s most unexpectedly comic moments. These performances help ground Riley’s larger satirical ambitions in human relationships and interpersonal stakes.
Visual style and thematic ambition
Riley leans into a vivid production vocabulary: bold costumes, saturated color palettes and inventive practical effects. The collaboration with cinematographer Natasha Braier, production designer Christopher Glass and costume designer Shirley Kurata yields environments that feel handmade and frequently ecstatic. Musically, the film is buoyed by contributions from Tune‑Yards, whose score punctuates the film’s comedic beats. Thematically, Riley interrogates fast fashion, branding and labor exploitation, framing the story so that theft becomes a mirror for systemic inequities. The script explicitly riffs on dialectical materialism, using that idea as a lens to explore how contradictions in economics and desire can produce new, if messy, syntheses.
Satire, surrealism and critique
The satire is both broad and pointed: the film skewers corporate PR, cultish brand logic and the environmental costs of disposable clothing. Riley’s humor often operates by exaggerating real industry practices—monochromatic boutiques, punitive dress codes and exploitative labor structures—until they appear grotesque. At times the surreal touches (stop‑motion insertions, wild character cameos, and sudden genre pivots) amplify the critique; at others they tug the narrative away from emotional throughlines, creating a deliberate, sometimes risky collage of tones.
Strengths, limits and festival rollout
I Love Boosters is strongest in its first two acts, when its energy feels fresh, nimble and uncompromising. The setup delivers incisive laughs and sharp ideological barbs that recall Riley’s earlier work, but the third act shifts into an action‑horror register that doesn’t land for every viewer. The film’s ambition is unmistakable: it wants to be entertaining, polemical and surreal at once. Even when it loses structural cohesion, many sequences—especially the comic demon cameo—remain memorably original. For audiences who prize invention over polish, Riley’s unevenness is often part of the film’s appeal rather than a fatal flaw.
On the festival circuit the film will have a hometown moment: SFFILM selected I Love Boosters as the Centerpiece of the 69th San Francisco International Film Festival with a West Coast premiere at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. The festival runs April 24–May 4, and the selection underscores Riley’s ongoing relationship with the Bay Area arts community. The film premiered at SXSW and is scheduled to open in theaters on May 22. Whether judged as a pointed satire or a gonzo genre mashup, I Love Boosters is a politically charged, visually adventurous entry that confirms Boots Riley as a filmmaker determined to stir conversation as well as laughter.