I Love Boosters Review: Boots Riley Blends Fashion With Surreal Sci-Fi

Few filmmakers follow their bliss quite like Boots Riley.

The Bay Area writer/director burst onto the movie scene with 2018’s Sorry to Bother You, a surrealist romp that blended elements of magical realism with political commentary on an exploited labor class. He followed that up in 2023 with the Prime Video TV series I’m a Virgo, also a surrealist romp that blended elements of magical realism with political commentary on an exploited labor class. Now, for his second proper feature film, Riley is leading off the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival with I Love Boosters, a period piece about House Booster’s succession crisis in 14th century England.

Just kidding: I Love Boosters is a surrealist romp that blends elements of magical realism with political commentary on an exploited labor class.

Three projects in to his burgeoning film career, it’s fair to say that Riley has developed a house style. For a lesser creative, that level of one-note fixation might begin to grow stale. Thankfully, the marriage of the surreal with leftist politics is a note that this rapper, songwriter, and record-producer-turned-filmmaker knows how to play quite well. And he continues to do so in I Love Boosters.

Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer who ekes out a living as a “booster,” pinching high-end textiles and selling them to her neighborhood at a discount. Together with her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), Corvette sets her booster sights on high-end fashion entrepreneur Christie Smith (Demi Moore) to close the fashion gap between the haves and have-nots.

Like Sorry to Bother You before it, I Love Boosters‘ premise is merely a jumping off point for all the vivid imagery and offbeat twists to come. The movie that a ticket-buyer expects to see at minute 0 is very much not the movie they experience by minute 60 or so. Unlike Sorry to Bother You, however, Boosters‘ absurdist twist isn’t a completely out-of-left-field human-animal hybrid situation but a far more mundane science fiction tool that we won’t spoil. Despite the relatively conventional sci-fi trappings of its back half (and that’s a strong “relatively” given that we’re talking about Boot Riley here), I Love Boosters feels satisfyingly anarchic and bizarre all the way through.

In fact, the film’s relatively tame (again: relatively) first half is undoubtedly its strongest. The director’s infectious love of fashion, art, and people shines through in vibrant color, largely thanks to an expectedly ambitious costume design. His penchant for magical realism is incorporated satisfyingly casually as well. Corvette and her friends routinely encounter the impossible – buildings tilted at 45-degree angles, Indiana Jones-style boulders of paperwork rolling down empty streets, 30-second lunch breaks – with a shrug. Such is life for working class schmoes.

The cast is uniformly excellent with Palmer, Ackie, and Paige centering the plot with winsome charm and clear chemistry. Paige, in particular, shines as the somewhat dimwitted Curly Howard or Charlie Kelly of the trio. Demi Moore proves that her The Substance awards season Linsanity Run was no fluke and that she is a tremendous cinematic asset when granted the right material and the right director. Eiza González, Poppy Liu, and Will Poulter round out the ensemble in sturdy fashion.

And then there’s LaKeith Stanfield, who turns up in a Jheri curl and just about vibrates off the screen… in no small part because many of his scenes feature his face in closeup with the frame literally shaking. Alongside a literally unrecognizable Don Cheadle, Stanfield helps make I Love Boosters Riley’s funniest effort yet by a wide margin.

Perhaps this is a lazy comparison to make because they’re both Black filmmakers from the Bay Area who use genre conventions to comment on race and class in America, but Riley’s dynamic with Stanfield reminds me of Sinners‘ director Ryan Coogler’s work with Michael B. Jordan. Both Stanfield and Jordan are fine actors in their own right, but their performances truly level up when guided by a trusted, consistent collaborator.

There’s another area in which I Love Boosters is faintly reminiscent of Sinners and it’s in that aforementioned divide between the movie’s first and second halves. Just as Sinners stands on its own as a period piece before the vampires even show up, I Love Boosters operates as an effective satire before the real sci-fi weirdness arrives. Unlike Sinners, however, I Love Boosters may have been genuinely better off without the sudden injection of genre madness. While the truly bonkers stuff gives Riley ample opportunity to flex his directorial muscles with impressive DIY-style miniature special effects, the script buckles under the weight of all the absurdity. Characters disappear throughout key passages as though there’s simply not enough room onscreen to accommodate them. And the film’s conclusion is more than a bit too simple and clean.

Still, if one counts I‘m a Virgo as a de facto film (and one should), Boots Riley is now three-for-three with his cinematic efforts. I Love Boosters‘ strained third act suggests that he might not be able to pull off the magic trick again on his fourth try but I won’t be the one to bet against the director continuing to follow his bliss.

I Love Boosters premiered at the SXSW Film & TV Festival on March 13. It opens in theaters on May 22.