Boots Riley Takes on the Fashion Industrial Complex in Surreal New Comedy ‘I Love Boosters’
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A New Kind of Workplace Comedy
Boots Riley has spent the better part of two decades treating art as a vehicle for systemic disruption. From his days as a community organizer with the Progressive Labor Party to the psychedelic corporate horror of Sorry to Bother You, Riley’s work has always been an indictment of the machinery of capital. His latest feature, I Love Boosters, continues this trajectory, though it swaps the oppressive dread of his previous work for a sharper, more whimsical comedic lens.
While the film shares the visual DNA and ideological rigor of his earlier projects, Riley is quick to dismiss the idea that he is building a cinematic universe. Instead, he views I Love Boosters as a specific exploration of class struggle—a theme he argues is often sanitized or entirely erased from the modern workplace comedy.
“There have probably been 10,000 or more workplace comedies or just workplace movies where the manager is an asshole or somebody is doing something wrong,” Riley noted in a recent conversation. “But few of them really center class struggle the way you see in Matewan, Norma Rae, and The Apartment.”
The film is set in a distorted version of the San Francisco Bay Area, where the architecture defies physics and demons roam the streets. In this world, a group of women—played by Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Poppy Liu—engage in the act of “boosting,” or shoplifting, from luxury fashion houses. Their target is the monochromatic empire of Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whose couture is priced far beyond the reach of the working class. To the “Velvet Gang,” stealing these clothes and selling them at a discount to their neighbors isn’t a crime; it’s a community service.
The Spectacle vs. The Movement
The plot kicks into gear when Smith dismisses the women as “low-class urban bitches,” transforming a financial skirmish into a personal vendetta. However, beneath the choreographed heists and comedic hijinks, Riley is making a pointed argument about the difference between performative activism and genuine political organization.
The film uses the global fashion industry as a microcosm for wider exploitation. For Riley, the narrative serves as a reminder that individual acts of rebellion, while satisfying, do not dismantle the system. The core of the film’s philosophy mirrors Riley’s own beliefs on labor: that real power only manifests when workers collectively withhold their labor to force systemic policy changes.
This commitment to material reality extends to the film’s aesthetic. I Love Boosters is a visual feast of absurdity, featuring a character living in fear of a giant “Katamari ball” composed of unpaid bills and chase sequences that blend stop-motion animation with miniature toy cars. It is the kind of bold, tactile filmmaking that often gets cited by tech enthusiasts as the very thing generative AI will eventually replace.
The AI Mirage
Riley, however, is deeply skeptical of the current AI gold rush. While studio heads and tech evangelists claim that generative AI is the inevitable future of cinema, Riley views the current hype cycle as a sophisticated scam, drawing parallels to the NFT craze.
He points to recent industry controversies, such as reports surrounding ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0, where highly touted “AI-generated” footage was allegedly revealed to be traditional green-screen work using existing video game technology. To Riley, the push for AI in Hollywood is less about artistic innovation and more about the trillion-dollar investments seeking a return through the devaluation of human labor.
For a director who focuses on the crushing weight of overdue bills and the visceral reality of the working class, the promise of an AI-generated utopia is an insult. Riley isn’t interested in the “false socialist utopias” often depicted in mainstream cinema—worlds where healthcare and housing are solved by magic or technology without any accompanying struggle. He prefers the friction of the real world, believing that centering the class struggle is the only way to signal that the current system is fundamentally broken.
