Boots Riley turns class struggle into comedy with I Love Boosters

Before Boots Riley became the writer / director / musician behind Sorry to Bother You and I’m a Virgo, he was a young community organizer fighting for social justice as part of the Progressive Labor Party. Riley has channeled his anti-establishment, pro-worker politics into every piece of art that he’s made. But his belief that our society is long overdue for a revolution is most clearly articulated in his latest feature, I Love Boosters.

You can hear elements of I Love Boosters’ anti-capitalist message sprinkled throughout “I Love Boosters!” — a 2006 song Riley wrote and produced for his hip-hop group, The Coup. The movie also looks and feels like it could be set in the same worlds as Riley’s previous visual projects, but when I spoke with him recently, he explained that he isn’t trying to build a shared universe. Though “each of these stories is guided by the same rules,” Riley wanted to set I Love Boosters apart by making it a comedy that explores the nuances of class struggle.

“There have probably been 10,000 or more workplace comedies or just workplace movies where the manager is an asshole or somebody is doing something wrong,” Riley told me. “But few of them really center class struggle the way you see in Matewan, Norma Rae, and The Apartment. The script writers might not have been involved in class struggle, but it was happening in the world around them, and it takes a huge effort to edit that reality out.”

Set in a fantastical spin on the San Francisco Bay Area where skyscrapers lean at impossible angles and smooth-talking demons prowl the streets, I Love Boosters tells the story of a group of women who see shoplifting from luxury fashion retailers as a form of community service. If the monochromatic couture created by Christie Smith (Demi Moore) were more affordable, Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie), Mariah (Taylour Paige), and Jianhu (Poppy Liu) would have no reason to steal the clothes and sell them at drastically lower prices to their overworked, underpaid neighbors.

The group’s cartoonishly choreographed heists don’t even come close to putting a dent in Christie’s astronomical profits. But when she calls them out as a gang of “low-class urban bitches,” they take it very personally and set out to show her what determined boosters are really capable of.

Though comedic hijinks ensue as the Velvet Gang concocts plans to hit Christie where it hurts, I Love Boosters gets serious as it highlights the differences between spectacle-focused activism and political organization that uses collective action as a tool to dismantle exploitative systems. In the movie, the exploitative system in question is the global fashion industry. But Riley thinks that I Love Boosters speaks to the reality of what it will take for our society to be reoriented toward genuinely supporting working-class people.

“We are powerless until we can make a mass militant radical labor movement that can use the withholding of labor to shut down parts of industries, whole industries, or multiple industries in order to stop profit and demand policy changes,” Riley said. “We are living in a global system of capital right now. Power under capitalism comes from capital itself, and we need to figure out how to have collective control of that.”

Like Riley’s last film and series, there is an absurdity to I Love Boosters. Corvette lives in constant fear of being crushed by a massive Katamari ball made of overdue bills, and when the Velvet Gang has to flee the authorities, the ensuing chase is depicted with a blend of stop-motion animation and toy cars zooming through miniature physical sets. The movie’s bold aesthetics and whimsical action both feel like the kind of artistic feats that generative artificial intelligence fanatics insist the technology is capable of. But Riley is resolute in his belief that AI proponents and studio heads who say that gen AI is the future of filmmaking are simply lying.

“It was exposed that the AI-generated video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise was basically made with video game technology that already existed 15 years ago,” Riley pointed out, referring to reports that ByteDance might have exaggerated the capabilities of its Seedance 2.0 video generator. “That company just shot footage of real fighters against a green screen. There’s a trillion dollars already invested in this technology, and a certain amount of the hype around it is just people scamming the same way we saw with NFTs.”

When I asked Riley about his thoughts on the way Hollywood has begun openly embracing gen AI, he stressed the importance of remembering how much money has already been poured into the technology based on the things it could potentially be able to do in the future. For his part, Riley has no desire to use the technology or to tell Disney-like stories set in “false socialist utopias where nobody’s worrying about housing, everybody’s got medical care, and people’s only concern about going to [college] is whether they want to move away or not.”

Instead, Riley’s much more interested in putting class struggle front and center because it “tells us that these challenges are widespread and endemic to the system, and that everything is not okay.”

I Love Boosters is in theaters now.