I Love Boosters (2026 | USA | 105 minutes | Boots Riley)

Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, the opening night film at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, confirms him as one of the few American filmmakers capable of turning political rage into genuinely original spectacle. Riley has not spent the eight years since Sorry to Bother You (SIFF 2018) moderating either his politics or his imagination.

For a movie featuring a giant rolling ball of unpaid bills that stalks its protagonist Corvette (the always wonderful Keke Palmer), portals used to move stolen goods between the U.S. and China, and a pyramid scheme called “Friends Helping Friends,” something even stranger happened between its SXSW premiere in March and its SIFF screening on May 14: shoplifting went mainstream.

A booster, you may have surmised, is slang for a shoplifter who resells stolen merch. In late April, The New York Times attempted to launder shoplifting into something chic, rebranding it as “microlooting” in a now-infamous podcast featuring Maus’s nepo baby, the most fashionable writer at The New Yorker, and a millionaire Twitch streamer all agreeing that theft was socially acceptable.

Anybody who can sit through hours of Hasan Piker and come away thinking they’ve encountered a serious political thinker deserves whatever happens to him, so let’s get back to I Love Boosters.

Corvette is an ambitious fashion designer, professional booster, and resident of an abandoned chicken restaurant. Her schemes generally involve a white woman feigning illness while Corvette and her crew stuff themselves into what resemble sumo suits made of stolen clothing before bewildered sales associates can figure out what’s happening. Her partners include Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), though the operation evolves considerably once they encounter Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a young Chinese woman harboring a secret capable of emptying a department store in minutes.

Corvette eventually sets her sights on Christie Smith (Demi Moore), the world’s most recognizable designer and a woman incapable of speaking to another human being without dripping contempt. Appropriately, Smith operates out of a leaning tower whose floors tilt at absurd angles. Corvette wants both to destroy Smith and earn her approval, capturing the psychic contradiction at the heart of capitalism: even those who reject the system still crave validation from the people sitting atop it.

The film boasts a hilarious lineup of supporting performances, including Don Cheadle as Dr. John, the grinning head of the “Friends Helping Friends” MLM empire, and Lakeith Stanfield as a dangerously charming suitor hiding a monstrous secret. The funniest performance may belong to Will Poulter as Greyson, the techno-loving manager of a Metro clothing store who forces employees to pay for the outfits they are required to wear on the sales floor.

Metro, Christie Smith’s fashion brand, mandates that every outfit sold or worn in its stores remain strictly monochromatic. Greyson has no tolerance for last year’s monochrome appearing on this year’s sales floor, even when the colors are indistinguishable to the human eye.

Sometimes anti-capitalist messaging in movies can feel rote, even to those of us inclined to agree with it. Riley, however, earned his credentials years before socialism became a fashion accessory for podcast guests and people with Substacks. Long before “eat the rich” became an aesthetic, his hip-hop group The Coup had already recorded “5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO” and notoriously planned to release an album cover depicting the destruction of the World Trade Center in the fall of 2001.

Frustratingly, I Love Boosters often feels unfinished. Entire character tensions appear only to evaporate, particularly between Corvette and Sade. Naomi Ackie, the breakout star from last year in Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, feels underused here. Riley also introduces brilliant ideas, like the unpaid-bills boulder, before abandoning them almost as quickly as he discovers them.

For all its flaws, I found it difficult to care. The movie runs only 105 minutes, and while Boots Riley may run out of time, he remains far from running out of ideas.

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I Love Boosters is now in wide-release.

SIFF Opening Night photos by Morgen Schuler. Movie still courtesy of Neon.