Review: 'I Love Boosters,' an absurd satire of fashion and capitalism, shows director Boots Riley at his most brilliant craziness

How much you love “I Love Boosters” will depend on what lever of absurdity and off-the-wall humor you can cram into your eyeballs.

Writer-director Boots Riley kicks up the strangeness well above that of his 2018 feature debut “Sorry to Bother You,” for a feverishly funny satire of fashion and late-stage capitalism that makes The Daniels’ “Everything Everywhere All at Once” look like a neorealist drama.

“Boosters,” the movie informs us early, are fashion-conscious shoplifters, people who steal haute couture from high-end boutiques and sell them at a deep discount. Mariah (Taylour Paige), a member of the Velvet Gang in the Bay Area, says it’s not theft but “fashion-forward philanthropy.” For fellow booster Sade (Naomi Ackie), it’s a way to make some side money to cover the costs of raising two kids.

But for the Velvets’ leader, Corvette (Keke Palmer), it’s about the money and something else: Revenge against one billionaire designer, Christie Smith (played by Demi Moore), who has over the years stolen designs from the internet — including from Corvette herself. And every time Christie declares over social media that she’s creating art while the boosters are “low-class urban bitches,” Corvette’s anger grows larger.

The Velvets target Christie’s chain of stores, Metro Boutiques, each one assigned to sell clothes in monochrome. One store may sell only yellow, so if you want something in green, you have to go to another store. 

Corvette soon discovers, though, that there are others with beefs against Christie. There’s Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez), a Metro Boutique clerk who resents having to sacrifice her paycheck to buy her company-mandated work outfits. And in China, Jianhu (Poppy Liu) is trying to lead a labor movement at the factory that makes Christie’s clothing — and when she and a colleague discover the bosses are experimenting with a teleporter (to save shipping costs), Jianhu suddenly lands in Oakland looking to steal the same clothes the Velvets want.

Riley’s script is endlessly inventive, often going down several paths simultaneously and occasionally in some bizarre and raunchy directions. The smoldering hot character played by Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” star, LaKeith Stanfield, encapsulates much of the movie’s adults-only humor.

Riley has much of his cast dialed up to 11. There’s Don Cheadle, unrecognizable under prosthetics, as a self-help guru with a pyramid scheme. And Moore is particularly manic as the designer with the delusional sense of her status as an artistic vision. Those overamped performances make you appreciate Ackie’s quiet charms as Corvette’s no-nonsense best friend. 

If there’s a limitation to Riley’s vision in “I Love Boosters,” it’s his budget, particularly in the somewhat distracting special effects and stop-motion animation that illustrate the director’s more insane thoughts. Those shortcomings are minor, and just an indication of how far Riley can go if someone wants to follow him down the rabbit hole.

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‘I Love Boosters’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language throughout and brief drug use. Running time: 105 minutes.