I Love Boosters (dir. Boots Riley)

by Jack Martin | Oct 31, 2026

Certificate: 18

Running Time: 114 mins

UK Distributor: Universal Pictures

UK Release Date: 30 October 2026

WHO’S IN I LOVE BOOSTERS?

Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, Demi Moore, Rachel Walters, Kerris Dorsey, Kara Young, Adam DeVine, Jason Ritter, Viggo Mortensen, Najah Bradley, Jermaine Fowler, Alan Z, Ming Sun, Eric André, Kate Berlant, Robin Thede

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Boots Riley (director, writer, producer), Allison Rose Carter, Jon Read, Aaron Ryder and Andrew Swett (producers), Tune-Yards (composer), Natasha Baier (cinematographer), Terel Gibson and Matthew Hannam (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A trio of fashion shoplifters (Palmer, Ackie and Paige) end up uncovering a bizarre conspiracy…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON I LOVE BOOSTERS?

With only two features (and a Prime Video miniseries), Boots Riley has established himself as a satirist with some of the most out-there, borderline insane concepts that end up saying so much about our wider society that it almost hurts to think about them all. But with his latest feature I Love Boosters – eight years after his eye-catching debut Sorry to Bother You – he might have already reached peak weird, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but does make you wonder: after everything he pulls in this movie, where the hell is he going to go next?

Of course, that’s for future Boots Riley to worry about. For now, all we can do is bask in the complete bizarreness of I Love Boosters, a film that revels in its own wackiness and unpredictability while still making it an enjoyable experience for its inevitably baffled audience.

Taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area, we follow a group of young women – Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) – who together form “the Velvet Gang,” a band of “booster” vigilantes who routinely shoplift obscenely overpriced designer clothes and then sell them among their community for a heavily discounted price. A frequent target of theirs is fashion designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), who makes her disdain for the Velvet Gang very public – she flat-out refers to them as “low-class urban bitches” during an on-camera moment – and makes it her mission to bring them down. The Velvet Gang, meanwhile, make it their mission to cause monumental damage to Christie’s reputation and her company, both of which are already facing some blowback from its employees and factory workers in China for deplorable work conditions and insultingly low wages.

That all seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? However, this is a Boots Riley movie, which as we saw in Sorry to Bother You practically has no meaning for the word “straightforward.” Without giving away some of its wilder turns, I Love Boosters somehow manages to sneak in plot elements that combine science-fiction, supernatural horror, Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion effects, and Don Cheadle under unrecognisable prosthetics in a small role as the head of a blatant pyramid scheme. All of it, incidentally, executed with the kind of zany and logic-defying comedy you’d find in an average Looney Tunes cartoon or Monty Python sketch, complete with set-pieces that incorporate some deliberately elaborate production design and a heavily bouncy musical score.

But as wild as all of that may sound, and in a lot of cases they turn out to be exactly as weird as it sounds, I Love Boosters isn’t the kind of movie to throw it all at you without prior warning. Riley gives it all a natural progression in this crazy universe where oddness of this scale is the norm. For example, when one of the three leads learns that a prospective love interest, played by Sorry to Bother You lead LaKeith Stanfield, is literally far more monstrous than he leads on, her initial response is to just block his number, as though this isn’t the first time she or any other human has encountered such a being. The same applies to the villain’s metropolitan headquarters being this impossibly slanted building where every room is at a Dutch angle, or when a character reveals an inexplicable ability to change their skin tone by simply holding their breath. In a way, it makes the overall joke that Riley is trying to get across here much funnier, because nobody here is trying to be funny or outlandish; things just are, and as such it’s strangely easier to accept the madness of this world as much as its inhabitants do.

Sometimes, though, the film can go a bit too far off course with its zany nature, to where it can start to become a little tricky to decipher the actual commentary being made. Riley, an outspoken socialist, is clearly targeting the evils of capitalism and its exploitation of both cheap resources and undermined communities, a subject that’s been satirised from the very beginning (and for good reason), but after a while those themes, along with the story and character arcs, tend to get caught in their own little cycle until it appears that the film wants you to notice its out-there-ness more than its actual strengths as a contained narrative. In his defence, its out-there-ness is fascinating to watch, especially from a visual standpoint with sets and costumes (oh, the costumes in this movie!) that stand out for their bright monochromatic colours and vivid, cartoonish designs. But every once in a while, it teeters on being one of those “style over substance” movies that blatantly favours one over the other.

It is precisely due to the keen nature of Riley’s filmmaking that I Love Boosters narrowly avoids that unwanted distinction. As he did with Sorry to Bother You (and, I presume, his miniseries I’m a Virgo which I didn’t watch), he creates such a enjoyable anything-goes world with humour that is direct, sharp, and most importantly funny, that you are oddly drawn into the madness of it all, and are able to find something of value amidst the chaos. It’s quite possibly the funniest and weirdest (lovingly so) fashion satire since Zoolander, and is more or less what many of us were hoping that Zoolander 2 would be but so woefully wasn’t.

SO, TO SUM UP…

I Love Boosters is an unapologetically wacky social satire from filmmaker Boots Riley that doubles down on the cartoonish and off-kilter humour of his previous feature Sorry to Bother You, but while it sometimes threatens to become caught in its own weird web at the expense of its vital central commentary, it is entertaining and funny enough to get sucked into all the madness.