{"id":336703,"date":"2026-03-13T05:45:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T05:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/336703\/"},"modified":"2026-03-13T05:45:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T05:45:07","slug":"keke-palmer-in-boots-rileys-anti-capitalist-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/336703\/","title":{"rendered":"Keke Palmer in Boots Riley’s Anti-Capitalist Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBoots Riley<\/a>, the punkish filmmaker behind Sorry to Bother You<\/a> and Amazon\u2019s I\u2019m a Virgo<\/a>, has a proven knack for creating surreal realities that feel truer, somehow, than the ones we can see outside our window.<\/p>\n

\n\tHis latest feature, I Love Boosters, is set in a version of the Bay Area where the floors of an office are tilted at a 45-degree angle, where a demon sucks the souls out of people by going down on them, where a teleportation device shows great promise as a way for retailers to cut down shipping costs. But watching it feels less like being transported into a different universe than putting on X-ray goggles to look at our own \u2014 and finding, buried under all the frustration and despair, a joyful and unruly sense of hope.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tI Love Boosters\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tWild, weird and delightfully unique.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: SXSW Film Festival (Headliner)
Release date: Friday, May 22
Cast: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza Gonz\u00e1lez, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Demi Moore
Director-screenwriter: Boots Riley
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRated R,
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 45 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tAs usual with Riley\u2019s work, the plot of I Love Boosters swerves and somersaults in unpredictable directions, and part of the pleasure is flying blind into whatever the writer-director has in store. But the basics are these: Corvette (Keke Palmer<\/a>) is the leader of the Velvet Gang, a trio of boosters who raid upscale stores to resell the goods \u2014 not that it seems to net them much, seeing as she\u2019s squatting in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant. Lately, their favorite designer to target is Christie Smith (Demi Moore<\/a>), a grandiose billionaire who maybe has a habit of taking Black people\u2019s ideas and passing them off as her own.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn preparation for their latest heist, the trio get retail jobs at one of Christie\u2019s boutiques, where a potential wrinkle pops up in the form of a cashier, Violeta (Eiza Gonz\u00e1lez), who\u2019s thinking of organizing. Then another, much bigger wrinkle appears in the form of Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a Chinese worker who has her own reasons for wanting to wipe out Christie\u2019s stores. From there, what had started as a straightforward operation to make some cash (and a well-oiled one, as seen in a hilarious sequence that ends with Corvette\u2019s sweatsuit stuffed with so much loot she looks like the Stay-Puft marshmallow man) spirals into something much bigger, stranger and ultimately more rewarding.<\/p>\n

\n\tCorvette\u2019s world is one seemingly comprised of grifters all the way down, and soulless capitalists all the way up. The cure for loneliness pitched by a guru (Don Cheadle, unrecognizable in prosthetics) turns out to be a pyramid scheme. A store manager (Will Poulter) speaks in elaborate corporate jargon to confuse his workers into complacency. Meanwhile, TV news only ever seems to air segments like \u201cCrying Black Mother Demands More Police\u201d and \u201cUpstanding Community Member Praises the Freedom of Lower Pay.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn these moments, Boosters feels less like a heightened version of our reality than simply a blunter one, with the artifice stripped away. At other times, no exaggeration is needed at all: A tragic subplot about sweatshop employees getting sick from sandblasting denim is just factually true<\/a>. It\u2019s no wonder Christie sums up her fashion design statement as, \u201cReality is unchangeable, but we can change how we perceive reality.\u201d Amid so much pain and avarice and dishonesty, it can feel very easy to agree.<\/p>\n

\n\tBoosters doesn\u2019t, though. Riley finds absurd humor amid all this bleakness, sprinkling his film with sight gags like shift employees crouching into starting blocks to make the most of their too-short breaks, or Corvette\u2019s teammate Mariah (Taylour Paige) passing as white by holding her breath until all the color drains from her face. Helping to set that mischievous, upbeat tone is superb work by production designer Christopher Glass and costume designer Shirley Kurata, who paint this universe in lime greens, banana yellows, hot pinks and then \u2014 in a sharp counterpoint to Christie\u2019s sneers that these boosters have no creativity of their own \u2014 fill it with eye-popping costumes that reference everything from the \u201990s rave scene to that flower-power ending from Midsommar.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the film takes a hard turn into sci-fi, with the appearance of a device that has the power to deconstruct or exaggerate or teleport items, things get wackier still; I won\u2019t spoil the best surprises here, but suffice it to say they involve stop-motion animated characters and a car-chase sequence zanier than anything Dom Toretto\u2019s fambly could dream up.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the end, Riley\u2019s freewheeling ambition leaves I Love Boosters overstuffed. Among other things, a subplot featuring LaKeith Stanfield as a mysterious model, though amusing, feels spliced in from another film entirely, while a separate subplot about growing tension between Corvette and her best friend, Sade (Naomi Ackie<\/a>), never gets enough attention to land with the emotional weight it ought to.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut I find it hard to wish Riley would rein himself in when the excess is so much a part of the film\u2019s joy \u2014 the sense that we need not limit our imaginations to what the cynical billionaires or disingenuous politicos insist we must. Christie may see humankind as but a canvas for her \u201cwearable art,\u201d but it\u2019s her skeptical assistant who has it right. \u201cI don\u2019t think people want to be the art,\u201d she says. \u201cThey want to be the artist.\u201d Boosters encourages us to pick up that brush, and get to painting our own futures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Boots Riley, the punkish filmmaker behind Sorry to Bother You and Amazon\u2019s I\u2019m a Virgo, has a proven…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[165253,28474,146,85,46,28473,397,137883,52223,39175,52222,165097],"class_list":["post-336703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-boots-riley","tag-demi-moore","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-keke-palmer","tag-movies","tag-naomi-ackie","tag-south-by-southwest","tag-sxsw","tag-sxsw-2026","tag-sxsw-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}