Boots Riley made Sorry to Bother You on a shoestring and came out with one of the sharpest satirical films of the last decade. I Love Boosters is what happens when he gets a bigger budget and slightly less editorial discipline: the ideas are still sharp, the execution is gloriously unhinged, and the film occasionally disappears up its own creative ambition. The premise is clean. Three Black women — Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie), and Mariah (Taylour Paige) — shoplift couture from upscale stores and sell it at knockdown prices, Robin Hood-style. Their target is billionaire designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), who occupies a building that literally tilts at an experimental angle, which is doing a lot of metaphorical work. The boosters are smart, stylish, and fundamentally decent — which is why the film earns something when they wind up on the moral high ground almost by accident. The best idea in the film is Mariah's superpower: by holding her breath, she can pass as white and move through upscale stores without being challenged. Riley drops this into the film as casual worldbuilding, but the Frantz Fanon resonance — Black Skin, White Masks — is intentional and lands cleanly. It's the kind of detail that makes you wish the film gave itself more room to breathe around it. Demi Moore is the film's strangest structural choice. She was presumably attracted by the prospect of something like The Substance's career-resurgent villain role. What she actually gets is an extended cameo — potent when she appears, but the film is not really about her. Cheadle's fraudulent community leader and Stansfield's demonic oral-sex-enthusiast succubus (yes, really) are equally underserved: fascinating character sketches that arrive, detonate, and vanish. Poppy Liu's Jianhu, wielding a toilet-seat-sized magic portal ring that teleports stolen clothes back to the exploited Chinese workers who made them, is the film's moral hinge and deserves an entire subplot Riley doesn't quite give her. The pace is the problem. This is, as the Guardian's review notes, enough material for twelve streaming episodes compressed into feature length. Riley edits as if afraid that stillness will cost him the audience, so the film never settles into any of its better ideas long enough to let them fully develop. It's consistently funny — the setpieces work, the performers are all doing excellent physical and comedic work — but you can't shake the feeling you're watching a highlights reel from a longer, better cut. What saves it is that the politics are actually coherent under the chaos. The boosters aren't noble criminals; they're pragmatic women navigating a system that has already decided their value. The Chinese factory workers aren't a punchline; they're the structural argument the film is making. Christie Smith's tilting building isn't just a visual gag; it's extraction architecture made literal. Riley trusts the audience to connect these things without underscoring them, which is more than most studio comedies manage. For the right viewer — someone who loved Sorry to Bother You but wished it were louder and funnier, or someone who can tolerate formal chaos when the ideas underneath it are genuinely interesting — this is a worthwhile night out. If you need your satire to sit still long enough to make its full argument, you'll leave frustrated.
