I Love Boosters: Fashion Forward Filanthropy | SXSW 2026
There's intentionality to the film using how it looks to propel its story that calls to mind the built in worlds of Jacques Tati or Demy, but so driven by Riley’s Bay Area idiosyncrasies: here, a sci-fi sprawler that courts the intersection of exploitation in the fashion industry
When Boots Riley dropped his psychedelic debut Sorry to Bother You in 2018, and coming of age series I’m A Virgo in 2023, it cemented him as a surrealistic and future forward storyteller with a taste for color and a passion for fashion. But with that came room for expectations: could he hit it again? Would he lag behind the culture, or push it over the edge? It’s good then that in I Love Boosters Riley proves he's still on the pulse, as what starts as a simple heist complicates by the minute in hilarious and topical ways, even if it whiffs it by the time it wraps up.
Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie), and Mariah (Taylour Paige) make a living re-selling stolen clothes at a steep markdown, tagging themselves at each heist as the Velvet Gang. Call them boosters: like community service, for fashion. This is all well and good and fabulous until the introduction of Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a righteous factory worker, into their group kickstarts the plot from stylized Ocean’s 11 to the other side of the twilight zone: teleportation devices, sex demons, and other strange nasties I won't spoil widening the scope of this story to uglier truths about the high fashion empire run by Demi Moore, putting on an alien affectation somewhere between Andy Warhol and Coco Chanel.
The biggest appeal of I Love Boosters is how much Riley and costume designer Shirley Kurata use style to inform on substance, saturated looks with silhouettes slightly askew and set against color blocked sets that match it. There's intentionality to the film using how it looks to propel its story that calls to mind the built in worlds of Jacques Tati or Demy, but so driven by Riley’s Bay Area idiosyncrasies: here, a sci-fi sprawler that courts the intersection of exploitation in the fashion industry; black culture vultured by white designers, Chinese factory workers overworked to make the slop, and the retail staff underpaid to hawk the synthesis.
But the film has this unfortunate abundance of ideas without the room for it, so lofty and ambitious which sometimes really hits but mostly leads to erratic non-starters. It's not half as well-constructed or hard hitting as Sorry To Bother You in reaching for class commentary, but is maybe more eminently watchable because the ensemble of Liu, Ackie, Paige, Palmer handle the material with force enough and camp enough to make it pop. The actresses play off on each other so well: Palmer and Ackie giving the screen sizzling heat, Paige excelling at comic relief (with a Robin Thede cameo related to her that had me howling), Liu injecting ample heart with her role while Moore is having a ball hamming it up as a vampiric villainess underserved by the script. Which really is its biggest problem: the vibe of this thing is electrifying and ratchets beautifully yet it almost seems afraid of fully tipping over the edge, so it blunts itself before it hits on a big swing. Which is kind of insane because this film is made out of so many big swings.
Satiric though it might be, I Love Boosters is a fever dream romp that can't find the off switch when it needs a couple seconds to breathe. It looks incredible, it says a lot, it boasts a brilliant cast and sparkling comedy and astute points about the interconnected nature of struggle—what we wear, whether you'll be evicted tomorrow, to whether you own your own imagination—but it's only very good when it easily could've gotten to great, sacrificing a tight structure for loose mess. Sassy and so fun to watch on a big screen, I just wish that it sharpened the knife on the commentary it makes. Reached more of a class eruption. Guillotined that shit a bit. Eiza Gonzalez stoner brainiac seizing the means of production is a total MVP.
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