Eight years ago, I saw, and wrote a very short review, writer/director Boots Riley’s first movie, Sorry to Bother You. A weird comedy that attacked race, class, and capitalism, it was a weird movie that I, to a certain extent, still don’t quite know what to make of, but it did feature LaKeith Stanfield using his “white voice” to go up the corporate ladder at his telephone solicitation job. The movie demonstrated a writer/director with a very creative view of the world. Surely his next movie would be something a lot of people would want to see, just to see what bizarre thing his mind might cough up next.
And then, eight years later, his second movie is finally out, and this time, Keke Palmer is taking on the fashion industry.
Palmer stars as Corvette, a frustrated fashion designer who lives out of an abandoned chicken fast food restaurant with her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige). The trio make their living by boosting high fashion, mostly from the billionaire fashion designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), someone Corvette looks up to but whose shops tend to sell very expensive clothes in a distinct monochrome for each store. Corvette and her friends then sell the clothes to people in her neighborhood for a big discount. Corvette has a number of concerns. She envisions a giant ball of eviction notices chasing her around, a really hot guy (LaKeith Stanfield) keeps showing up and making her knees weak, and Christie actually has it in for Corvette and her friends, known publicly as the Velvet Gang.
However, things get complicated when the trio take a job at one of Christie’s stores, where one snooping co-worker (Eiza González) keeps pushing them to join a labor union, and a competitor with what looks like a magic bag (Poppy Liu) has her own reasons to get back at Christie. All this exists in a world where mothers cry on TV to get law enforcement to stop the boosters because they set a bad example for kids, and a guy known as Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle in a fat suit) is selling people on an obvious pyramid scheme as the one way out of the poorhouse. However, Christie is not as hard-working as she claims to be, and soon, it becomes a lot more personal for Corvette and her friends to bring down a woman who, allegedly, has some suits that sell for $100,000 and would make an easy fortune for the Velvet Gang if they can get their hands on one. Can the women bring down a fashion mogul, and is that what they really want?
If you saw Sorry to Bother You and thought it was really weird but you liked it anyway, good news: I Love Boosters is basically the same thing. Stanfield’s character has a wild backstory, the special effects don’t look very realistic and that is on purpose, and there’s even a car chase where the cars look an awful lot like models. But really, you don’t go to a Boots Riley movie expecting realism. He’s here to say capitalism is awful, and he has his own ideas on what to do about it. He may be the most leftist director working in anything like mainstream movies these days. Sure, I don’t think some of the conclusions he comes to would have seemed new to anyone who saw, say, Glass Onion, but he puts his own spin on the ideas.
That said, I will admit my tricky hearing made it hard to understand what some of the characters were saying when they spoke over each other, and the goofy-sounding music (goofy is a good adjective here) makes it hard to take anything too seriously, but this is not an even-remotely serious movie. I went into this one a bit more forearmed considering what happened with Sorry to Bother You, but this is one bizarre movie, and your mileage may vary on how much you like bizarre.
Grade: B-
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