Playful is not always the easiest tone for a film to aspire to — that is, without the risk of coming across as too twee. Yet Boots Riley’s new comedy I Love Boosters manages, for the most part anyway, to charm and entertain through its eccentric style and heightened storytelling. We follow three boosters (thieves who resell goods for a lower price, in this case high-end clothing products) played wonderfully by Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige. Their prime targets are the clothing outlets belonging to designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore); but they struggle to contend their art with their cause. This is a dynamic, though eventually inconsistent work, wherein the harmony between style and story occasionally becomes mangled.
Visually, I Love Boosters will give cinema lovers much to praise and discuss in terms of cinematography. But it’s in the production design (and, of course, costuming) that it’s really thriving. The lensing and camerawork has a modern, pleasing quality to it — although it’s nothing we haven’t seen before; shot entirely on ultra-crisp anamorphic lenses, the film adopts a look which defines a great many indie works of the moment. Yet all the exciting stuff comes in the use of colour in the clothing and the outrageous level of inventiveness in the sets. The outfits pop and every expressionistic set decision (such as the antagonist’s tilted apartment building, making it impossible for her assistants not to slip) has some character relevance.
Although this does bring me onto the main issue with the film. The film’s unique style of absurdist humour and tangential hijinks ends up being a two-edged sword. At any given moment we encounter either a satisfying abstraction — such as the rolling boulder following our protagonist, an amalgamation of all her creative, financial fears — or, a tiresome expository device in the form of something fantastical — such as the teleportation machines, at first a funny joke, made clunky once it requires constant rules, explanation and plot-moving import.
And yet, no matter how well you receive these frequent visual diversions (which, it must be said, are a core part of the movie’s very structure), the thing constantly guiding our emotional response, and also making us laugh a lot more than any aesthetic decision, are the performances. The trio of Palmer, Ackie and Paige gives the film its crowd-pleasing power. All are giving strong performances, anchored by Palmer at the centre, who’s superb. They’re hilarious, cheeky, and seem to find a confidence by operating within Riley’s specific tone.
The thematic core of this movie is irresistible for a contemporary audience. We follow a charismatic group of criminals (cool), made even cooler by the fact that they’re art-loving, anti-capitalist heroes who look incredible and have fun whilst they do said crime. To complement this, our antagonist — the domineering Demi Moore in a performance I argue is superior to her renaissance role in The Substance — is someone intrinsically fascinating. This is where the film hits on something quite thoughtful. She’s a creator of sorts who everyone can’t help but admire despite the evils she represents. An authoritarian, ends-justify-the-means leader with an obsessive, single-track mindset; with taste so refined that even our heroes want her recognition.
This is a vibrant, original movie with a real sense of energy about it. And even when that expressive energy leads the story mechanics astray, viewers can rest assured that they’ll be riveted by great stars doing great work, having a lot of fun in the process.
