I Love Boosters

The eponymous boosters are motivated by various causes, including the triple-F of 'fashion forward philanthropy'. They do know how to spell, and to count. Taking high-end clothing and selling it at a discount is a calling, if not a cause, and one whose clarion you'd do well to heed.

I love I Love Boosters. Writer/director and various multihyphenate polymath Boots Riley has had an extensive musical career but with his debut feature Sorry To Bother You created a film that I adore whose restless invention and intention put it in a category of 'see it to believe it'.

Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylor Paige), and Sade (Naomi Ackie) are those Boosters, variously pursued by objects of desire (as played by LaKeith Stanfield) and pursuing objects of desire (as sold by Demi Moore's Christie Smith). Escalatory, hallucinatory, off-kilter and on-brand, the introduction of Eiza Gonzalez' Violeta and Poppy Lieu's Jianhu are part of a headlong and headstrong helter skelter, a polyphonic and political spree.

With a tremendous soundtrack and score, Tune-Yards returns on composing duty from Sorry To Bother You. It's also a treat to behold. Christie's shops are a mirage of monochromatic merchandise. Those clothes are part of tremendous production design, Shirley Kurata's costume design (she also did for the similarly grand grab-bag of giddiness that was Everything Everywhere All At Once) is given room to flourish.

In any number of fandom spaces there are just two complaints - things being the same, and change. If I have one qualm about I Love Boosters, and it is from a place of churlishness, it's those. This is akin to musing about the order of tracks on your favourite album. Boots' musicality is a theme I'll return to, a willingness to add notes and ideas and to riff and to repeat that produces something that sweeps you up. The same but different levels of invention that make Sorry To Bother You and his later streaming show I'm A Virgo is present here, and so too my fondness for it.

Riley has a style, one I adore. I knew there would be reckless invention, that there would be hair-raising accelerationism, that I'd want to see it again. All of those are true. I suspected there'd be ideas introduced that lesser films would attempt to spin out while this grabbed another and another and another, and so it came to pass.

There are moments where the special effects are perhaps outstripped by their ambition, but as with Hope, the qualities of their quality is part of their charm. This happens to be one of two films with Eric Andre in cinemas at the moment, but unlike Street Fighter more than the least of its parts. I don't know where the line is between art and noise but I can feel it. This film is the former, that the latter. The nods to The Blues Brothers and Police Story are knowing ones, lifted like samples and repurposed to consistently compelling and chaotic effect. Where I Love Boosters steals it does so with intent, with verve, with vision. Put yourself in a position to grab it while you can.