Boots Riley’s ‘I Love Boosters’ Uses Surrealist Comedy to Attack Capital and GenAI Hype
Table of Contents
Beyond the Workplace Comedy
Boots Riley has built a career on the intersection of radical politics and avant-garde art. From the subversive hip-hop of The Coup to the surrealist corporate nightmare of Sorry to Bother You, Riley’s work consistently frames the individual’s struggle against systemic exploitation. His latest feature, I Love Boosters, continues this trajectory, though it pivots toward the specific mechanics of class struggle through the lens of a high-concept comedy.
While the film shares the dreamlike, often jarring aesthetic of Riley’s previous projects, he is quick to clarify that he isn’t interested in building a cinematic universe. Instead, he is interested in the nuances of labor. According to Riley, the traditional “workplace comedy”—where the primary conflict is simply a bad boss—often ignores the structural reality of class. He points to classics like Matewan and The Apartment as rare examples that acknowledge the external political pressures acting upon the characters.
In I Love Boosters, this struggle is manifested in a distorted version of the San Francisco Bay Area. The plot follows a group of women—played by Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Poppy Liu—who treat shoplifting from luxury fashion houses as a form of community mutual aid. By stealing monochromatic couture from the formidable Christie Smith (Demi Moore) and selling it at affordable prices to their underpaid neighbors, the “Velvet Gang” turns a criminal act into a political statement. The conflict escalates when Smith dismisses them as “low-class urban bitches,” sparking a vendetta that transcends simple theft and enters the realm of targeted economic sabotage.
The AI Illusion
Visually, the film is a feast of absurdity. Riley employs a mix of stop-motion animation and miniature physical sets, including a sequence where a character is pursued by a massive Katamari-style ball composed of overdue bills. It is the kind of high-fidelity, imaginative imagery that proponents of generative AI claim will soon be effortless to produce. However, Riley views the current obsession with genAI in Hollywood not as a technological leap, but as a financial grift.
Riley’s skepticism is grounded in the gap between marketing and reality. He cites reports surrounding ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0, noting that some of the most touted “AI-generated” footage—such as a viral clip of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise—was allegedly achieved using traditional green-screen techniques and existing video game technology. To Riley, the push for AI in filmmaking is less about art and more about the trillion-dollar investment bubble currently inflating the sector.
“There’s a trillion dollars already invested in this technology, and a certain amount of the hype around it is just people scamming the same way we saw with NFTs,” Riley says.
For Riley, the danger of AI isn’t just the potential for job loss, but the sanitization of storytelling. He rejects the notion of using these tools to craft “false socialist utopias”—polished, frictionless worlds where systemic issues like housing and healthcare are simply hand-waved away. He believes that true art must acknowledge that the current system is broken.
Collective Control
Ultimately, I Love Boosters serves as a vehicle for Riley’s broader thesis on power. He argues that within a capitalist framework, power is derived exclusively from capital, and the only way for the working class to regain agency is through collective, militant labor movements. He suggests that the withholding of labor is the only tool capable of forcing genuine policy change in a globalized economy.
By centering the film on the global fashion industry—a sector notorious for exploitative labor practices—Riley bridges the gap between surrealist comedy and hard-line political theory. He concludes that by keeping class struggle front and center, the film refuses to offer the audience the comfort of a “everything is okay” ending, insisting instead that the challenges facing the working class are endemic to the system itself.
