I Love Boosters (2026) Review

It’s always tough to write about a Boots Riley production, because he’s kind of a cinematic mad scientist. Traditional rules like subtlety or avoiding didacticism are thrown out the window, and that’s no different for I Love Boosters. Bursting with color and ideas, this piece of gonzo agitprop follows Corvette and her friends trying to steal and re-sell enough clothes to buy a stable life, only to get caught between an international labor strike involving a petty billionaire and a teleportation device. Riley’s on record saying his main goal with any piece of art, be it the music he makes or this specific film, is to influence people to take action in their real life. His last film generated a wave of worker-led strikes, and while one can only hope this one does the same, I can’t help but wonder if it collapses under the weight of its own ideas.

This is, to a certain degree, par for the course when it comes to Riley’s films. But whereas Sorry to Bother You (2018) took its time to build our understanding of the protagonist—his hopes and insecurities—this film seems to use a kind of shorthand. We see Corvette squatting in an abandoned chicken shop, we hear her co-conspirators talk about having kids, and that’s assumed to be enough to make us care about them. We never learn why Corvette is so interested in fashion or designing, and the same distance is applied to the rest of the ensemble. Flattening the characters into an almost archetypal register lets Riley have fun spinning an unhinged satire about workers, the lumpenproletariat, and the bourgeoisie; but when things get really chaotic and we don’t have that emotional anchor, it becomes hard to navigate as a viewer. This might have something to do with the dialogue.

Joel Whitney’s book, Finks, details how the constant call for subtlety and nuance in creative writing was a CIA plot to counteract the ‘socialist realism’ of the USSR, so it makes sense that this film would operate in rebellion against that tradition; and, at its best, I Love Boosters benefits from that directness, showing us how characters are feeling, the subtle shifts in their relationships as the need to survive and the need to resist begin to clash. At its worst, it mistakes explanation for drama, spoon-feeding viewers exposition for the sake of moving the story along. One scene awkwardly describes how dialectical materialism’s structure as thesis-antithesis-synthesis (a more Hegelian shorthand than a Marxist understanding of contradiction grounded in material relations) helps power the teleportation device. Whether that stiffness comes from the writing or the performances, there are stretches where the film feels less like a story than a lecture sprinting to its next set piece.

              I’m a big KeKe Palmer fan, but the lived-in feel she so often brings to her characters was totally absent in this for me. To be fair, she was given very little to work with thanks to the paper-thin character the script creates for Corvette, but I still didn’t see the emotional commitment she brought to her other recent comedy roles like Good Fortune (2025) or One of Them Days (2025). Fresh off her pro-AI rant at Cannes, Demi Moore delivers some genuinely bizarre line reads as the air-headed narcissist fashion mogul serving as the film’s primary antagonist. A lot of it works to create an image of her character as someone so focused on ‘making art’ that she’s willing to ignore the real cost of the fashion industry, but her character is ultimately little more than a cardboard cutout.

              Though the characters are thin, I can at least say they were photographed beautifully. DP Natasha Braier does a great job contaminating the blacks so that there’s a softness to the image despite the beautifully garish colors that dominate each frame. The camera movements are lively and add to the frenetic pace of the film. There’s also some stunning set design that reminds me of But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) thanks to its monochromatic palette fitting the absurdism of the script.

              Though I found myself chuckling as the characters literally raced to enjoy their 30 second lunch break, I was surprised at how few times I actually laughed while watching this film. Several comedic beats feel wedged into an already overcrowded script, and some of Riley’s political choices are similarly underdeveloped. The decision to have the boosters team up with exploited Chinese factory workers, for instance, feels oddly simplistic. I understand the need for internationalism, but it’s strange that a movie so eager to flex its Marxist muscles would choose to critique the most successful socialist state existing today. China’s contemporary position in global capitalism is far more complex than the “third world sweatshop” tropes evoked in the film, making the internationalist politics feel frozen in an earlier era of anti-globalization discourse. Like much of the movie, it’s a provocative idea that’s never really interrogated. Chalk it up as being one of many contradictions in this messy, big swing of a movie. There are certainly better scripts, but you’d be hard pressed to find a more ambitious visual delight onscreen this weekend than I Love Boosters. Be sure to watch it in theaters! The color, the chaos—this is what the movies are meant for!