By Ashton Starr
I saw I Love Boosters at the Ottawa Cineplex theatre with only seven other attendees. Due to limited promotion, when I was invited to watch it with a friend, I exclaimed “Boots Riley has a new movie?”
After a short two-week opening in May, the film is back on the big screens in Ottawa for only three nights (July 10, 12, 13) at Mayfair Theatre.
Rapper-turned-director Boots Riley is an outspoken communist and unionist. His art style is violently critical of capitalism, grounded in abstract Marxist concepts – but also fun and humorous despite the impending doom the current economic system is driving the world towards.
From early screenings, critics rated I Love Boosters 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, with Kristy Puchko of Mashable calling it “outrageous, provocative, and really fucking fun.” So, why did I just hear about I Love Boosters through word of mouth? Why was the theatre almost empty? Why didn’t we see the bold and brightly coloured promotional posters plastered on our city’s billboards and vacant storefronts?
Poverty in the Attention Economy
The film enthusiasts I’ve spoken to weren’t aware of I Love Boosters’ release – even those who are also fans of Riley’s previous work. Anecdotally, it seemed like the movie wasn’t on anyone’s radar, that screenings were sparsely attended or its official trailer wasn’t shared enough (it did have 9.5 million views on YouTube at the time of publishing).
I may have only heard about it from a friend due to my limited social media use or very restrictive ad-blockers. And Internet and streaming ads were the two avenues distribution company NEON concentrated on, according to a Reddit post by Riley.
However, the rare occasions I was around a television or opened Instagram in the app, I was inundated with new movie advertisements that I can now recite verbatim. From Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu and Warner Bros’ Supergirl, I was fully aware of this summer’s movie release schedule.
“Every aspect of mundane life is seemingly exaggerated in Riley’s surrealist style: colours are brighter, sex is weirder, music is louder and antagonists are more conniving.”
Coincidentally, the other fashion-centric film of this season, The Devil Wears Prada 2, seemed to have a packed theatre before we entered the adjacent screen. To test my assumptions of I Love Booster’s numbers, I went to buy tickets to screenings the next day. Most of the times offered had all but 2 or 3 seats unavailable – basically private screenings for couples or small groups.
Despite my personal love of the movie (I rated it 4.5 out of 5 stars on Letterboxd), I Love Boosters screenings had abysmal attendance, earning an estimated $4.72 million US at 1,750 theatres. Am I wrong about the film?
I Love I Love Boosters! You Should Too!
Aside from the funk-infused hip-hop track of the same title by Riley’s band, The Coup, I knew nothing about the plot of I Love Boosters. Coming out of screening, The Coup’s lyrics gave an excellent synopsis.
A booster is a person who jacks from the retail
And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale…
But most of it was made by children in Asia
The stores make money off of very low wages
The next time you see two women running out the Gap
With arms full of clothes still strapped to the rack
Once they jump in the car, hit the gas and scat
If you have to say something, just stand and clap.
Now you have an idea of what the movie is about – somewhat.
Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylour Paige) and Sade (Naomi Ackie) are boosters trying to survive and better their lives through black market clothes reselling – or as Mariah puts it, “triple F: fashion-forward philanthropy. I know how to spell philanthropy.” One of their options is to plan a massive retail theft spree which gets derailed when they stumble upon another shoplifter they assume to be a fellow booster.
Taking this real-life situation, Riley produces it similarly to telemarketing in Sorry to Bother You by surprisingly infusing it with fantasy and science-fiction elements. The opening scenes are grounded enough in reality to not make the viewer too suspicious of the shocking genre-flip from comedic heist-crime-thriller to sci-fi-fantasy-horror comedy. I Love Boosters is reminiscent of Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), who also throw in weird and funny reality-breaking gags into their films.
An attendee near me in my sparsely attended screening exclaimed “whoa,” “what” and “what the fuck?” about a dozen times throughout its 113 minute runtime. Every aspect of mundane life is seemingly exaggerated in Riley’s surrealist style: colours are brighter, sex is weirder, music is louder and antagonists are more conniving.
Riley’s justified hatred of the ruling class – those who exploit workers rather than work themselves – informs the fashion mogul antagonist, Christie Smith (Demi Moore). The eccentric and racist billionaire would also be a fantastical exaggeration, if it weren’t for the real-life eccentric and racist billionaires whose antics are constantly visible in the media. Riley knows who society’s enemies are and illustrates caricatures of them in every conception: swindling multi-level marketers, class-traitor political commentators and overly-militarized police forces.
“Capitalism is built upon theft.” – Boots Riley, director
The doom that’s presented in the film isn’t all gloom, as every scene is beautiful with vibrant colours in lighting and sets. There’s meticulous care to presentation, especially with the use of stop-motion and possibly even miniatures used in some shots. With a budget of an estimated $20 million US, there’s real skill going into the cinematography that feels like a real labour of love, rather than green-screened or rushed visual effects completed in post-production processes.
At times, the tight shots made me feel the confines of these small sets, limiting a view of expansive stores or luxury condos they were showing. Most other negative reviews I’ve seen have been positive for me – “cartoonish” with “too much plot” was welcoming. Despite my minor gripes, I Love Boosters is an important film discussing a revolutionary political imagination rarely seen on the big screen.
Boots on the Revolutionary Groundwork
What drew me in to Boots Riley’s art was predominately his political analysis, the dominating element of his lyrics in bands The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club (with Rage Against The Machine’s guitarist Tom Morello) as well as the entirety of his filmography. Riley has a means of taking complex Marxist concepts and articulating them in a way non-academic masses can identify.
Riley’s anti-capitalist analysis is apparent in all of his work, including The Coup’s “The Guillotine,” his debut film Sorry To Bother You (2018) and his TV mini-series I’m a Virgo (2023).
In 2022, I referred to Sorry To Bother You optimistically in The Leveller’s “Films for Leftists,” believing that film representation of revolutionary labour politics has broken free of Hollywood blacklists of yesteryear, or being a misappropriated topic as fleeting teenage angst. The few labour union-centric films I highlighted scored over 75 per cent (with some reaching over 90, which is a rare feat) on popular review sites like Letterboxd, Rotten Tomatoes and Amazon’s IMDb.
It’s not that the working class don’t enjoy or crave stories on the big screen about our own class struggles.Corporate powerhouses in entertainment continue to avoid political content in their media, particularly video-streaming giants Hulu and Netflix — both of whom Union (2023) co-director Stephen Maing told CBC were “not doing political films.”
In an interview promoting I Love Boosters on CBC’s Q, Riley charged : “Capitalism is built upon theft. Throughout history, any ruling class, they started with primitive accumulation, stealing land, stealing minerals.”
In Capital Volume One, Karl Marx theorized primitive accumulation as “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” through violence before the times of feudalism and slavery to our current capitalist economy.
“And right now, there’s theft that is legal. And I’m not even just talking about wars… where they’re threatening genocide in order to take someone’s oil,” Riley continued.. I’m talking about the theft of labor and of value that happens every day. We’re talking about all those things in this movie.”
While understanding Marx’ writings took me years of studying political science at Carleton, I Love Boosters depicts theories like dialectical materialism in a single scene with cinematic beauty, graceful execution and humour.
There’s no need for a university degree to enjoy I Love Boosters – the film’s brilliance won’t be lost on a mass of movie-goers. Riley’s writing drops subtext and symbolism of political struggles in favour of it being explicit and the forefront of visually-chaotic and constantly-moving entertainment for the masses.
While streaming rentals in Canada are now available, screenings like the one at Mayfair Theatre are important. They show statistics for distribution of this kind of film, but more importantly, offer an opportunity for community and friends to get together, enjoy a piece of art and reflect on how our modern economy can transition into something better for all of us.
