‘I Love Boosters’: Keke Palmer in Boots Riley’s Anti-Capitalist Comedy

Boots Riley, the punkish filmmaker behind Sorry to Bother You and Amazon’s I’m a Virgo, has a proven knack for creating surreal realities that feel truer, somehow, than the ones we can see outside our window.

His latest feature, I Love Boosters, is set in a version of the Bay Area where the floors of an office are tilted at a 45-degree angle, where a demon sucks the souls out of people by going down on them, where a teleportation device shows great promise as a way for retailers to cut down shipping costs. But watching it feels less like being transported into a different universe than putting on X-ray goggles to look at our own — and finding, buried under all the frustration and despair, a joyful and unruly sense of hope.

As usual with Riley’s work, the plot of I Love Boosters swerves and somersaults in unpredictable directions, and part of the pleasure is flying blind into whatever the writer-director has in store. But the basics are these: Corvette (Keke Palmer) is the leader of the Velvet Gang, a trio of boosters who raid upscale stores to resell the goods — not that it seems to net them much, seeing as she’s squatting in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant. Lately, their favorite designer to target is Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a grandiose billionaire who maybe has a habit of taking Black people’s ideas and passing them off as her own.

In preparation for their latest heist, the trio get retail jobs at one of Christie’s boutiques, where a potential wrinkle pops up in the form of a cashier, Violeta (Eiza González), who’s thinking of organizing. Then another, much bigger wrinkle appears in the form of Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a Chinese worker who has her own reasons for wanting to wipe out Christie’s stores. From there, what had started as a straightforward operation to make some cash (and a well-oiled one, as seen in a hilarious sequence that ends with Corvette’s sweatsuit stuffed with so much loot she looks like the Stay-Puft marshmallow man) spirals into something much bigger, stranger and ultimately more rewarding.

Corvette’s world is one seemingly comprised of grifters all the way down, and soulless capitalists all the way up. The cure for loneliness pitched by a guru (Don Cheadle, unrecognizable in prosthetics) turns out to be a pyramid scheme. A store manager (Will Poulter) speaks in elaborate corporate jargon to confuse his workers into complacency. Meanwhile, TV news only ever seems to air segments like “Crying Black Mother Demands More Police” and “Upstanding Community Member Praises the Freedom of Lower Pay.”

In these moments, Boosters feels less like a heightened version of our reality than simply a blunter one, with the artifice stripped away. At other times, no exaggeration is needed at all: A tragic subplot about sweatshop employees getting sick from sandblasting denim is just factually true. It’s no wonder Christie sums up her fashion design statement as, “Reality is unchangeable, but we can change how we perceive reality.” Amid so much pain and avarice and dishonesty, it can feel very easy to agree.

Boosters doesn’t, though. Riley finds absurd humor amid all this bleakness, sprinkling his film with sight gags like shift employees crouching into starting blocks to make the most of their too-short breaks, or Corvette’s teammate Mariah (Taylour Paige) passing as white by holding her breath until all the color drains from her face. Helping to set that mischievous, upbeat tone is superb work by production designer Christopher Glass and costume designer Shirley Kurata, who paint this universe in lime greens, banana yellows, hot pinks and then — in a sharp counterpoint to Christie’s sneers that these boosters have no creativity of their own — fill it with eye-popping costumes that reference everything from the ’90s rave scene to that flower-power ending from Midsommar.

As the film takes a hard turn into sci-fi, with the appearance of a device that has the power to deconstruct or exaggerate or teleport items, things get wackier still; I won’t spoil the best surprises here, but suffice it to say they involve stop-motion animated characters and a car-chase sequence zanier than anything Dom Toretto’s fambly could dream up.

By the end, Riley’s freewheeling ambition leaves I Love Boosters overstuffed. Among other things, a subplot featuring LaKeith Stanfield as a mysterious model, though amusing, feels spliced in from another film entirely, while a separate subplot about growing tension between Corvette and her best friend, Sade (Naomi Ackie), never gets enough attention to land with the emotional weight it ought to.

But I find it hard to wish Riley would rein himself in when the excess is so much a part of the film’s joy — the sense that we need not limit our imaginations to what the cynical billionaires or disingenuous politicos insist we must. Christie may see humankind as but a canvas for her “wearable art,” but it’s her skeptical assistant who has it right. “I don’t think people want to be the art,” she says. “They want to be the artist.” Boosters encourages us to pick up that brush, and get to painting our own futures.