Movie Review: Boots Riley's 'I Love Boosters' is a wild, surrealist social satire

Boots Riley holds nothing back in his audacious, surrealist social satire “I Love Boosters.” The film is a go-for-broke expression of wild imagination and social consciousness that’s impossible not to admire for its wacky, bold vision, with teleporting, high fashion snobbery and pyramid schemes.

Here is a movie where we get Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige leading a vigilante shoplifting operation, Demi Moore as a toxic girl boss, Don Cheadle as a sleazy lifestyle evangelist, Will Poulter as a fussy store manager and LaKeith Stanfield as a discount brand model with a strange accent and a hypnotizing stare. It sounds like fun, right? Like a raucous, madcap ride through the inequities of the fashion business from the executive suite, down to the retail store where the goods are sold and the Chinese factories where they’re made? And on a certain level it is all of that, but one thing it is not is very funny. “I Love Boosters” can be amusing and clever, but the laugh-out-loud comedy just isn’t quite there. And it doesn’t help that the film goes more off the rails as it progresses to a climax that is less rousing than mind-numbing.

The thing is, “I Love Boosters” does start on a strong, albeit minor key as we’re introduced to the Velvet Gang, Corvette (Palmer), Sade (Ackie) and Mariah (Paige) and their booster operation, stealing overpriced designer wares from high end stores and selling them for a steep discount on the street. There’s a kind of a Robin Hood sensibility to it all. Mariah calls it “Triple F,” or “Fashion Forward Filanthropy.” She knows how to spell philanthropy, she deadpans; This is branding.

But despite the colorful surroundings, there’s a pervasive hopelessness in this off-kilter world that looks a lot like our own. Corvette, particularly, feels outside of it all, as a woman who dreams of being a designer herself but is currently squatting in a closed fast food chicken shop and being haunted by a boulder of debt (like, literally). It doesn’t help that the founder she idolizes, Moore’s Christie Smith, has become obsessed with stopping the boosters. To Christie, a genius megalomaniac, they’re the big problem with her business and not the fact that her store employees are being paid a pittance and her factory employees even less. The people who work at the factories are also getting sick from sandblasting the denim. And yes, these are all real things.

Eiza González’s vaping Violeta becomes the face of the store employees forced to use their own paychecks to buy their uniforms. Poppy Liu’s Jianhu, who teleports herself from China to the Bay Area, is that for the factory workers. This oddball group of five women band together to get revenge against Christie. Again, this all sounds like it should be a fun time, but the film is too busy jumping around and throwing ideas and concepts at the screen (teleporting somehow the least distracting of them) for us to spend much time just hanging out with these vibrant personalities.

It is a crime that this is only Riley’s second produced movie. Though it might not reach the crackling heights of his debut, “Sorry to Bother You,” his imagination is still on fire. Unlike so much of what’s out there, “I Love Boosters” has both style and substance, which is worth something even if it doesn’t land perfectly (or capably inspire any kind of revolution). In a marketplace full of content and franchises, here is a filmmaker with something to say and an interesting way to say it.

“I Love Boosters,” a Neon release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “strong sexual content, brief drug use, nudity and language throughout.” Running time: 115 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.