In I Love Boosters, shoplifting is not an interruption of the fashion industry. It is one more step in the supply chain.
Boots Riley's second feature follows Corvette, played by Keke Palmer, an aspiring designer and professional booster who steals high-end clothing with the Velvet Gang. Alongside Sade and Mariah, played by Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige, she moves luxury goods away from the people authorized to own them and toward people who will actually wear them.
The film begins as a heist comedy, but Riley has never allowed genre to remain stable for long. The crew's target is Christie Smith, a fashion mogul played by Demi Moore whose empire has profited from street style, exploited labor, and a design Corvette believes was taken from her. What starts as theft becomes revenge, artistic reclamation, political action, and eventually something much stranger.
Palmer is the ideal center for Riley's chaos. Corvette can deliver a revolutionary argument, improvise through a failed plan, and recognize the comic absurdity of her own confidence without losing authority. Palmer makes the character's anger inviting. Even when Corvette is wrong, the audience understands why people follow her.
Ackie and Paige keep the Velvet Gang from becoming an extension of one personality. Sade is more cautious about the cost of escalation, while Mariah treats danger as another opportunity to perform. Their chemistry gives the early shoplifting sequences the looseness of people who have developed a private language through repetition.
Riley stages those sequences with the rhythm of sketch comedy and music video choreography. Surveillance cameras, suspicious employees, clothing racks, and changing identities become pieces in a visual joke. In one of the film's defining ideas, the people being watched understand the system well enough to manipulate what it expects to see.
Demi Moore plays Christie with controlled absurdity. She is not merely a cruel executive who stole from a younger designer. She is a person who has transformed exploitation into a personal mythology of genius. Moore never asks the audience to believe Christie is secretly sympathetic. She makes the character believable as someone insulated from the moral meaning of everything she owns.
Riley treats fashion as art, armor, stolen labor, and evidence, often within the same outfit.
The satire widens through Jianhu, played by Poppy Liu, a worker who escapes an unsafe Chinese factory connected to Christie's clothing empire. Her arrival introduces a teleportation device and pushes the film from heightened heist comedy into full science-fiction farce.
That turn will divide audiences. Riley refuses to present capitalism as a realistic system operating behind the plot. He makes it visible as architecture, machinery, bodily exhaustion, and impossible technology. A crooked skyscraper turns class mobility into a physical joke. Clothing carries the distance between the person who made it and the person allowed to claim authorship.
Natasha Braier's cinematography meets Riley's ideas with saturated color and aggressive angles. The film is crowded with costumes, signs, tilted buildings, production design, and bodies arranged as part of the joke. Riley's images do not wait politely for the story to explain them.
The excess is exhilarating until it becomes difficult to separate emphasis from noise. LaKeith Stanfield, Eiza González, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, and others enter a narrative already balancing the Velvet Gang, Christie's empire, exploited labor, stolen designs, teleportation, romance, and political theory. Nearly every character is interesting. Few receive enough time.
The script is similarly overextended. Riley's arguments about theft are sharp because he refuses the easy distinction between legal ownership and moral entitlement. Christie can own a design she did not create. A store can own clothing made through exploited labor. The Velvet Gang can steal those clothes and still participate in the same economy by reselling them.
That contradiction gives the movie energy. It also deserves more dramatic pressure than the film provides. Corvette's desire to be recognized as an artist occasionally becomes secondary to the next surreal complication, even though it is the emotional link connecting the political satire to the heist.
Tune-Yards' music keeps the film in motion. Percussion, distorted voices, and abrupt rhythmic shifts make scenes feel like they are being pushed from inside. The score does not smooth the film's tonal changes. It makes the collisions part of the experience.
I Love Boosters is frequently very funny. Riley remains gifted at finding the ridiculous visual conclusion to an economic argument. His jokes do not pause after making their point, which means some of the best ones may be missed while the next idea is already entering the frame.
The film's lack of discipline is inseparable from its appeal. A cleaner version would be easier to follow and less honest about the fury behind it. Riley is not interested in producing a balanced satire of the fashion business. He wants to show a system that takes creativity from the street, labor from factories, money from consumers, and credit for bringing those things together.
What makes the movie more than a lecture is the joy Corvette and her crew take in style. They do not reject fashion as a shallow capitalist trap. They love it enough to be angry about who controls it. Clothes can exploit people, but they can also allow people to invent themselves in public.
I Love Boosters sometimes collapses under the number of things it wants to carry. It gets back up wearing something better.
