The cinema of Boots Riley is made of the purest intentions. An artist can make a film because of an itch in him that needs to come out, or a selfish will to gain fame and recognition. An artist can take a million shapes and forms, and Boots Riley makes films to change the world to what he wants the world to see. He throws away any preconceived ideas of plot and traditional structure for a dedication to the philosophy. A philosophical thesis he needs to present to his audience that is pretty much just simplified Hegelian dialectic made palatable for the masses. And let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with that, and I Love Boosters does it really well.
If you know Riley’s first film, Sorry to Bother You, you know what to expect. If you don’t, it’s a treat to experience his films unprepared for the first time. I like how he prepares the trailers to only give the important parts of the plot, i.e., the first 20 minutes, and leaves the crux of his story for the cinema experience.
Boosters are people who steal from clothes shop to sell on the side for cheaper. The story follows Corvette (Keke Palmer), a fashion designer-wannabe turned booster to make ends meet. She’s aided by her gullible friend Sade (Naomie Ackie) who tries to get Corvette involved in the pyramid scheme she got roped in, and Mariah (Taylour Paige) who has a strange superpower where she can change to a white-passing person if she holds her breath.
The target is the shops from Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a predatorial entrepreneur whose business model relies on 20 different late-capitalism strategies, like every shop has a different colour that changes every so often, and the workers need to wear those clothes, paid by them, if they want to have the privilege to work for her. One of these sycophants is Grayson, who manages a shop where Corvette and her friends infiltrate. In the process they come across Violeta (Eiza González), a shop assistant slowly turning into a union organiser fighting for the worker’s rights.
And this is where we have to stop before more is revealed. There is an addition of another mysterious booster (played by Poppy Liu), and a strange alluring man, played by Lakeith Stanfield, whom Corvette gravitates towards in spite of everyone’s warning.
While the first half is fairly normal, it’s when Poppy Liu appears that the film takes its subject matter to the real of absolutely no sublety. Very much like that scene from Sorry To Bother You, Riley shifts the gear of what was a stylistic comedy satire into a sci-fi heist romp with a strong communist message. There’s no subtext here: everything is text. Characters repeat the sentence “now is not the time for nuance” so many times, it becomes Riley’s mantra for the rest of the film. Later in the film he introduces an absurd macguffin whose rules change everytime a character needs it to. This is normally followed by a longwinded exposition about how that machine works, including how it fits the whole marxist theory and Hegel’s philosophical method. It could be eye-rolling, but the whole sequence is paced to a compelling beat that glues everything together. Almost like Riley saw the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once and figured the solution is to keep all his ludicrous ideas in the same place. I particularly like a long chase through the city that owes a lot to old school Michel Gondry.
I can hear the complaints from far away. It’s too irrational, too blunt. It reduces Marxist theory to bite-sized soundbites that don’t have the philosophy’s vital point. Riley has been criticised for working within a system that perpetuates the same things he criticises. His first TV show, They Cloned Tyrone was an Amazon Prime production. And this film is financed by Megan Ellison, the daughter of the Trump-supporting billionaire Larry Ellison, and sister to the Trump-supporting media mogul David Ellison. But Riley understands the world we live in, that nothing cannot be done without the blessing of our capital overlords, and the workers are relegated to cannon fodder to please a deity we’re all obssessed with. We live in a world where the leader of the most powerful country is an obnoxious oaf profiting from the chaos and misery he’s facilitating. A world where a trillionaire can openly boast about influencing elections, and a billionaire can finance a vanity trip to space and, coming back, thank the underpaid workers who made his dream possible. It’s a world where the top 10 per cent owns over 75 per cent of the planet’s wealth. Where you can be fired (or asked to leave) if you demand your rights to be upheld. Where there are slaves working in cacao farms in Africa who have never tasted chocolate. It’s a harsh and unfair world. Now it’s not time for nuance.
The plus: If there’s any justice in this world, Keke Palmer is on her way to glory.
The minus: Riley’s midpoint shift is a take it or leave it. To many it may be a little too absurd to stomach. For all that is worth, he finds his stride in this second picture, and I cannot wait how he’ll develop from here.