‘I Love Boosts’ review: Keke Palmer and Demi Moore in the wildly funny, uplifting, anti-capitalist thriller Boots Riley

Boots Riley, the evil director behind it Sorry to bother you And Amazon I am a Virgohas a proven talent for creating surreal realities that seem truer, somehow, than the ones we can see outside our window.

Its latest features, I love the boostersset in a version of the Bay Area where office floors are tilted at a 45-degree angle and where Satan sucks people’s souls out by descending on them, the teleportation device shows great promise as a way for retailers to cut shipping costs. But watching it doesn’t feel like we’re transported to a different world so much as we put on our X-ray glasses to look into our own world and find, buried beneath all the frustration and despair, a joyful, unbridled sense of hope.

As usual with Reilly’s work, plot I love the boosters It twists and turns in unexpected directions, and part of the fun is unwittingly flying into what the writer and director have in store. But the basics are this: Corvette (Keke Palmer) is the leader of the Velvet Gang, a trio of boosters who raid upscale stores to resell merchandise — which doesn’t seem to be earning them much, since she’s sitting in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant. Lately, their favorite designer to target is Christy Smith (Demi Moore), a mega billionaire who probably has a habit of taking black people’s ideas and passing them off as her own.

In preparation for the latest heist, the trio takes retail jobs at a Christie’s store, where potential trouble arises in the form of cashier Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez), who is considering organizing. Then another, much bigger problem arises in the character of Jianhu (Bobby Liu), a Chinese worker who has her own reasons for wanting to destroy Christie’s stores. From there, what starts out as a straightforward operation to make some money (and a good one, as seen in a funny scene that ends with a Corvette suit filled with so much swag that it looks like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man) turns into something much bigger, weirder, and ultimately more useful.

The Corvette world seems to be made up of hustlers all the way, and soulless capitalists all the way. The loneliness cure offered by the teacher (Don Cheadle, unrecognizable in prosthetics) turns out to be a pyramid scheme. The store manager (Will Poulter) speaks complex corporate language to confuse his workers into complacency. Meanwhile, TV news seems to only broadcast segments like “Crying Black Mother Demands More Police” and “Prominent Community Member Praises Low-Wage Freedom.”

In these moments, Reinforcement It feels more like an augmented version of our reality than just a sharper version, with the artifice stripped away. Other times, there’s no need for any exaggeration at all: the tragic subplot about sweatshop employees getting sick from denim is just matter-of-fact. It’s no wonder Christie sums up her fashion statement as follows: “Reality is unchangeable, but we can change how we perceive reality.” In the midst of so much pain, greed, and dishonesty, it can be all too easy to agree.

Reinforcement No, anyway. Reilly finds a wry sense of humor amidst all the doom, sprinkling his film with visual gags like the shift clerks crouching down in the starting blocks to make the most of their too-short breaks, or Corvette teammate Maria (Taylor Paige) who runs white by holding her breath until all the color drains from her face. Helping set that disturbing, upbeat tone is the masterwork of production designer Christopher Glass and costume designer Shirley Kurata, who paint this universe in lime green, banana yellow and hot pink, and then — in sharp contrast to Christie’s quip that these boosters have no creativity of their own — fill it with eye-catching costumes that reference everything from the ’90s rave scene to the end of Flower Power from midsummer.

As the film takes a heavy turn into science fiction, with the advent of a device with the ability to disintegrate, exaggerate or teleport objects, things get even more ridiculous; I won’t spoil the best surprises here, but suffice it to say that it includes stop-motion animated characters and a car chase sequence more awesome than anything the Dom Toretto family could dream of.

In the end, Riley’s liberated ambition leaves I love the boosters overstuffed. Among other things, a subplot featuring LaKeith Stanfield as a mysterious supermodel that, while entertaining, feels like it’s out of another movie entirely, while a separate subplot about the growing tension between Corvette and her best friend Sade (Naomi Ackie) never gets enough attention to reach the emotional heft it should.

But I find it hard to hope that Reilly will restrain himself when excess is so much a part of the film’s pleasure—the feeling that we don’t need to limit our imaginations to what cynical billionaires or crooked politicians insist we should. Christie may see humanity as nothing more than a canvas for her “wearable art,” but her skeptical assistant is the one who gets it right. “I don’t think people want to be art,” she says. “They want to be the artist.” Reinforcement He encourages us to pick up that brush, and start painting our future.