Last week at the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw I Love Boosters, a 2026 absurdist crime comedy written and directed by Boots Riley. The film centers on Corvette (Keke Palmer), the ringleader of a group of "boosters," shoplifters who resell high-end designer clothes at a discount to survive. She and her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) create elaborate distractions to pull off their heists, like having a white woman accomplice distract the salespeople, or having one person fake an injury while another steals. Despite all of this, the trio are still broke, and Corvette lives in an abandoned fast-food chicken restaurant, and is haunted by the vision of a giant ball of past-due bills rolling towards her.
The "Velvet Gang" target the Metro Designers chain, run by designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a billionaire who Corvette both despises for her capitalism and loves for her fashion design, being an aspiring fashion designer herself. Christie regularly appears in the media to claim that her designs are her vision of transformative art, of seeing her customers as wanting to be elevated like her, and she condemns the Velvet Gang as "low-class, urban bitches," to which one of the members, when seeing Christie say it on TV, remarks that "urban bitches" sounds very early 2000s and dated.
At one of the Metro Designers stores, one of the salespeople, Violeta (Eiza González) and her co-worker confront their boss Grayson (Will Poulter) about why their paychecks are so low, only earning $40 in a week after taxes. He is dismissive to them, keeps blasting loud club music to drown them out, and in between playing music says that the cost of the expensive Metro Designers outfits that they have to wear for work (and have to wear new ones for each season, as well as keeping with monthly monochromatic themes of the store, a la Emerald City in The Wiz) got taken out of their paychecks. Their lunch breaks are only 30 seconds, there is a high turnover rate of employees, and when the Velvet Gang get jobs at that store to steal inventory, Corvette realizes that Christie stole one of her fashion designs off her social media to pass off as her own. But before the Velvet Gang can pull off another heist, all the clothes get stolen in seconds while they are in a meeting with Grayson, and upon security camera footage, they see a young woman named Jianhu (Poppy Liu) sucking all the clothes into her bag, and they go, "She's got a magic bag!"
The movie is delightfully weird and absurd, where the characters live in a strange world that is heightened reality. Christie Smith lives in a high-rise building that is tilted at a 30 degree angle, where the floor is so tilted that people can barely walk or balance on it, and in a scene when Corvette hides in a coffee cart to spy on Christie, she tries to sneak out and can barely scale the floor to the door before sliding back down.
The film uses a lot of creative practical effects, like model cars for a car chase, stop-motion animation characters, and zooming back with Keke Palmer on a dolly track for big reactions.
The film has a lot packed into it, and it feels like it's trying to be about different things: capitalism; labor strikes; artists' designs getting stolen by corporations; poor people being exploited; women of color being marginalized by rich white people; a science fiction teleportation and deconstruction device; unsafe factory conditions, etc. It can get overwhelming and not feel as tightly compact as Riley's previous film Sorry to Bother You, but it is a lot of fun to watch, and I liked how bold and colorful the film was combined with the practical effects.
Naomi Ackie was a delight to watch, who I've enjoyed in movies like Mickey 17 and Sorry, Baby, and I thought Eiza González was a scene-stealer and got a more interesting role than just being cast to be "sexy." And I like that after The Substance, Demi Moore is getting more into offbeat, weird films, and throws herself into this role as an awful person who has deluded herself into thinking she's uplifting people with her fashion.
I really enjoyed this movie a lot, it's one of the standout movies of the year so far.
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