I Love Boosters

Boots Riley made Sorry to Bother You in 2018. That film, about a Black telemarketer who discovers his 'white voice' leads him into complicity with something monstrous, was a Marxist nightmare comedy that earned its politics through sheer formal invention. It wasn't subtle. It wasn't trying to be. The horse-men in the third act made certain of that.

I Love Boosters is his follow-up. Eight years and one more film later, he's made the same argument in a new genre: shoplifters as proletarian heroes, a fashion mogul as the face of capital, and a surreal Bay Area as the backdrop for what the IndieWire review correctly called a 'socialist stoner comedy.'

In a heightened version of the San Francisco Bay Area, Corvette (Keke Palmer) runs a crew of boosters, people who steal merchandise and resell it. Their target becomes Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a fashion executive who stole the crew's designs and built a luxury empire on them without credit or compensation. The boosters decide to take her down.

This is redistribution as plot. The film's logic, stated outright in its final act, is that Christie's wealth is stolen in the first place. Taking it back isn't theft. It's justice. Riley is not hiding this argument. He is making it as loudly and as clearly as he knows how.

Riley is a skilled filmmaker. The film is well-shot by Natasha Braier, who gives the Bay Area a heightened, slightly unreal quality that serves Riley's surrealist instincts perfectly. Keke Palmer is excellent. She always is. Her performance as Corvette has the physical intelligence and professional authority of someone who has been running a serious operation for years. She doesn't play Corvette as a Robin Hood moral beacon justifying theft. She plays her as a specialist. That specificity saves the character from becoming a pamphlet.

Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Poppy Liu fill out the crew with distinct energies. They feel like people with shared history. Demi Moore as Christie Smith is a weaker element, not from performance failure but from character thinness. The script doesn't give Christie an interior life. She exists to be defeated. Her defeat is the political point.

Here is what I Love Boosters is, stated plainly: it is a film that argues wealth redistribution is morally correct, that individual ownership of property is illegitimate when the wealthy possess it, and that capitalism is the central organizing crime of contemporary American life. Boots Riley believes these things. He has believed them his entire adult life. He makes films that argue for them. He is not hiding any of this.

For VirtueVigil readers, I Love Boosters is exactly what it looks like. A $20 million socialist comedy in which shoplifting is heroic, corporations are evil, and the villain is a white female fashion executive with no interior life. The woke content isn't subtext. It's the text.

Tune-Yards' score gives the film its surreal forward momentum. The ensemble works better than the script fully deserves. This is a technically accomplished, ideologically committed film. The VVWS score reflects exactly how accomplished and exactly how committed.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Anti-capitalism as central narrative and moral framework	5	High	High	6.3
Glorified wealth redistribution: shoplifting from the rich framed as heroic justice	4	High	High	5.04
Billionaire/corporate class as cartoonish villain with no moral dimension	4	High	Moderate	2.8
Collectivist solidarity over individual achievement as highest moral value	3	High	High	3.78
Predominantly female diverse ensemble as revolutionary class vanguard	3	High	Moderate	2.1
TOTAL WOKE				20.0

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Found family: loyalty and solidarity among people who rely on each other	2	Moderate	Low	1
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				1.0

Score Margin: -19 WOKE