One of my favorite scenes in “I Love Boosters” happens very early on in the film’s runtime.
Two boosters (shoplifters, with the intent of reselling their wares for profit), Corvette (Keke Palmer) and Sade (Naomi Ackie) are robbing a store. We watch them chitchat as they quickly file away clothes into what we assume are large bags, although it’s hard to see beyond the racks of monochrome clothing.
When Corvette and Sade finally leave, Sade carrying a comically overstuffed purse, we realize that Corvette never had a bag on her in the first place – instead, she’s stuffed the stolen contraband into her own clothes, waddling through the parking lot looking like a giant pink marshmallow – a true blue (or pink) Michelin Man.
There are a plethora of moments in “I Love Boosters,” the new film from filmmaker Boots Riley, that feel outlandish to the point of absurdity. But what tickles me about this moment is the relative smallness of it. It’s not the most outlandish thing you’ll see in the film (that award goes to whatever is going on with LaKeith Stanfield, which I won’t spoil for you here). But it delicately shapes the audience’s expectations of the world we’ve entered into – this is more like “Looney Tunes” than the real world. Anything can happen.
Riley has always had a surreal, outsized approach to expression (just look at the size of his hats). While he doesn’t necessarily have a formula when it comes to world-building in his films, he’s usually trying to emphasize difference as much as possible.
“I’m trying to heighten the contradiction to the point where that feels like something – to where you’re turning something from an idea into a feeling,” he said.
And heightened “I Love Boosters” is. Written and directed by Riley, the film takes place in a surrealist version of San Francisco where Corvette, Sade, and their compatriot Mariah (Taylour Paige) take aim at fashion tycoon Christie Smith (Demi Moore) after Corvette learns Christie has been stealing her designs. What they uncover during their vendetta is something more insidious than they could have imagined.
Much like “Sorry to Bother You,” Riley’s 2018 film that follows a Black telemarketer (played by Stanfield) who adopts a “white voice” in order to get ahead at work, “I Love Boosters” shares its name with some of Riley’s musical work as part of the hip-hop group The Coup. Riley sees a connection between his musical and cinematic careers, particularly in the way that producing music is similar to directing a film – it all comes down to figuring out how to get a group of different people to work toward a similar vision.
“My methodology for putting ideas together and for presenting them to other people, my ways of thinking about mistakes and the swings I want to make – all of those things are things that I get from music,” Riley said.
There’s a certain rhythm that comes with watching a Boots Riley film – and not just because of the jaunty, frenzied, circus-esque score from Tune-Yards that chugs along through “I Love Boosters.” There’s a musicality to how each scene unfolds, and for Riley, the challenge is to put the audience on his wavelength.
“Being a lyricist, you learn pretty quick that it doesn’t matter how great your lyrics are if people don’t love the beat,” he said. “How do you make them love the beat?”
Luckily, with “I Love Boosters,” the beat isn’t so hard to love. Riley said he is often looking to repel people in his films as often as he’s looking to draw them in. But, he said his experience with “I Love Boosters” has been a little different. This time around, it feels like the audience’s response has been less of, “What is this?” and more of “This is something I didn’t know I needed.”
There’s a concept in “I Love Boosters” called the “situational accelerator.” If you point it at something – a person, a building, whatever it might be – it transforms that thing into the logical endpoint of its exaggeration. During a screening of the film at this year’s Atlanta Film Festival, Riley considered the fact that the movie itself has served as a situational accelerator for the audience watching it, forcing them to consider questions about capitalism, labor, and art. Questions like, if the wealthy elite are the enemy, why do we try so hard to emulate their lifestyle? What is marketed to us as desirable, and who gets to decide that?
Corvette is the character that best exemplifies this tension. She hates Christie Smith for stealing her designs, hates everything that she represents about the intersection of commerce and art. At the same time, Christie Smith represents a warped sort of ideal – she’s in a position of power that, in some ways, Corvette aspires to. There’s a potent mix of anger, resentment, and begrudging respect that populates Palmer’s performance.
For Riley, that contradiction felt real. For the audience, it injects something grounded in the bizarre world of the film.
“For me, for instance, as a rapper, I don’t freestyle. Why? Because so much sh*t will come out that I disagree with. But it’s also part of me, right? Because I came up in this world,” Riley said. “I think that contradiction, of understanding who’s against you, but also feeling like they are the epitome of what things should be about. We all have those sorts of situations.”
In “I Love Boosters,” those are the types of ideas that Riley is trying to turn into feelings. The result is a deft display of absurdist overload, a visceral experience that taps into all five senses. That sense of feeling is something that Riley thinks movies have somewhat lost these days. By breaking those rules – mixing genres, mixing live action and stop-motion elements, featuring a car chase that unfolds with miniatures on a scaled-down model of the San Francisco streets – Riley has created a style all his own.
“Feature film as an art form has gotten a little bit away from feel. We look at all other art forms, and we know this is about how it feels. Does it feel good? But with film, we have all these rules. Part of that is because it costs so much money to make,” he said. “I understand how that happened, but I think we also end up losing something. We end up losing the poetry.”
“I Love Boosters” opens in theaters this weekend.
