I Love Boosters Review: Boots Riley Turns Theft Into Pop Art

I Love Boosters review: Boots Riley’s second feature is a wild, funny, overstuffed heist comedy about shoplifters who turn luxury fashion against itself. Led by Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige, it opens as a retail raid and grows into a sci-fi protest movie with cult potential.

That description still feels too tidy for a film this joyfully untidy. On the official film page, the premise is simple enough: professional shoplifters take aim at a cutthroat fashion maven. In the theater, Riley treats that premise as a trapdoor, then keeps finding new floors beneath it.

A Heist Comedy With a Political Fuse

Corvette, played with fierce comic snap by Keke Palmer, leads a crew that steals expensive clothes and pushes them back into the world at prices ordinary people can reach. Naomi Ackie’s Sade and Taylour Paige’s Mariah are not sidekicks in the usual caper sense. They are the rhythm section, the argument partners and the emotional ballast.

The target is Christie Smith, Demi Moore’s icy designer and brand prophet, whose company Metro Designer sells ugliness with the confidence of a religion. The film starts from a joke that has teeth: if luxury fashion depends on making most people feel excluded, what happens when the excluded learn how to move the inventory?

Apple TV’s film listing classifies the movie as comedy and adventure, and that split is useful. The comedy is in the insult, the costume, the store manager losing his mind. The adventure comes when the scheme gets too large for a register, a dressing room or a getaway car.

• Opening-night world premiere: South by Southwest (SXSW, the Austin film and media festival) announced the film as its opening night title.
• Second Riley feature: The SXSW release described it as only the filmmaker’s second feature film.
• R-rated release: Apple lists the film with an R rating for sexual content, nudity, language and brief drug use.

That Austin launch matters. Our earlier coverage of the SXSW opening slot treated the premiere as a bet on Riley’s audience finding him again. The finished film makes that bet look brave rather than safe.

Keke Palmer Carries the Velvet Gang

Palmer gives the film its motor. Corvette is ambitious, wounded, vain in flashes and tender when she thinks nobody is grading her. The performance works because Palmer refuses to turn the character into a simple folk hero. She lets the arrogance show, then lets the neediness sneak in behind it.

Ackie has the harder job in some ways. Sade has to sell loyalty while watching the group’s logic bend around Corvette’s obsessions. Her best moments come in reaction, with a stare that says she has already heard three bad ideas and knows a fourth is coming.

Paige, meanwhile, seems born for Riley’s line readings. Mariah moves through scenes with the exact energy the film needs, half accomplice, half live wire. When the story tips into stranger territory, she helps keep the human stakes from being swallowed by the concept.

The supporting cast is thick with people who know how to play absurdity straight. Don Cheadle, as Dr. Jack, appears almost disguised inside a guru routine. Will Poulter turns a luxury retail manager into a small tyrant with speakers. LaKeith Stanfield, Riley’s lead in Sorry to Bother You, is deployed here as a sly joke about male beauty and narrative expectation.

The Riley Pattern From Oakland to the Mall

The new film belongs to a body of work that is more coherent than its chaos suggests. Riley keeps building stories where capitalism is not background noise. It is the machine, the villain, the seduction and the punchline.

The oldest root sits in Riley’s music. The Coup track of the same name appears on the Pick A Bigger Weapon album page from ANTI as track 13, and the label’s own note describes it as a comic ode to shoplifting that shifts into something more tender. That tonal swing is the film in miniature.

Fashion Satire With Teeth and Glitter

The satire works best when Riley trusts the physical world: racks of clothes, hideous objects sold as desire, the ritual humiliation of the boutique floor. Metro Designer is funny because it feels only slightly pushed beyond recognition. Anyone who has ever stood under aggressive retail lighting and wondered who decided a price tag could become a personality test will get the joke.

Moore is crucial here. Christie Smith could have been a cartoon of a fashion monster. Instead, Moore plays her as someone who knows that taste is a weapon because she has spent years sharpening it. Her calm is funnier than a tantrum would be.

The film’s sharpest digs land in three places:

• The way luxury brands sell scarcity to people who can afford abundance.
• The way retail workers are asked to police desire while barely sharing in the money it creates.
• The way a stolen idea becomes legitimate the moment the right person sells it back with better lighting.

That last point gives the heist its moral charge. Corvette is not stealing from a neutral system. She is answering theft with theft, which is why the film is more interesting than a standard rob-the-rich fantasy. The crew’s ethics are messy, and Riley knows it.

The Swerves That Make or Break the Ride

Here is where the movie will lose some people. The first half has enough shape to pass as a rowdy crime comedy. Then the sci-fi material takes over, and Riley starts treating plot as something elastic. Characters bend, locations tilt, and the logic of the movie begins to obey a dream rather than a plan.

For me, the swerve is the point. Riley’s gift is not neat construction. It is the feeling that a gag can become a theory, a theory can become a chase, and a chase can become a costume change that somehow says more than the speech before it.

Boots has created another wildly original and boundary-pushing vision that’s deliciously unpredictable.

Claudette Godfrey, vice president of Film and TV at SXSW, used that line in the SXSW opening night announcement. Festival language often comes padded with praise, but this one happens to be accurate. Deliciously unpredictable is the polite version. The blunt version is that Riley keeps throwing flaming props into his own juggling act.

Not every bit lands. A few jokes arrive too fast, and a few ideas crowd the frame before they have room to breathe. There is also a late burst of body horror and sexual weirdness that will be too much for viewers who came only for a bright heist comedy. The excess is part of the ticket price.

Who Should Buy a Ticket

If you want a clean caper, this may drive you mad. The film is too talky, too stuffed and too fond of taking the scenic route through its own imagination. It also has more color, nerve and comic invention than most studio comedies would risk in a decade.

The closest audience is not just fans of Sorry to Bother You. It is anyone who liked the tonal whiplash of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the anti-fashion venom of Zoolander, or the feeling of a midnight movie that somehow got a serious cast and a real marketing budget.

Our verdict is three stars out of four. The flaws are visible, but so is the pulse. Riley has made a movie that treats bad taste, class rage, performance, friendship and retail theft as parts of the same unruly dance.

If theatrical crowds are willing to ride with the madness, this becomes the cult object Riley has been circling since his music years; if not, it will wait for its people at home.