Boots Riley’s most recent sci-fi comedy, I Love Boosters, is fun, visually stunning, and quirky. Some find it confusing near the end. I agree, with the caveat that I let the confusion take me where it would. Where was that? No place that’s revolutionary.
This matters. Both Riley and critics interpret I Love Boosters as an anti-capitalist, if not revolutionary, tale. It’s not. The oft-quoted line by Fredric Jameson that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism is the film’s unintentional theme. Riley gives us a “worker’s rights, hurrah” moment at the end, but we get there through science fiction, flukes, and plot stretches that make the pro-labor message more imaginary than aspirational.
I Love Boosters‘ Suffering Rich and Beatified Poor
Clearly, the film addresses race, gender, and class. I’ll summarize the three but focus on class.
Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie), and Mariah (Taylor Piage), the three main characters, are Black women who are boosters, that is, professional shoplifters who steal haute couture clothing to resell to common folk. Two Black male characters, Pinkie Ring Guy (LaKeith Stanfield) and Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle), have questionable intentions toward the boosters and, in fact, all women. All the US-based bosses are White, with special attention to the hateful and hateworthy uber-rich haute couture designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), the object of Corvette’s envy and enmity.
[Spoilers Ahead] A Chinese woman, Jianhu (Poppy Liu), materializes, literally, near the end of I Love Boosters, to challenge Smith, who outsources the manufacture of her clothes to Jianhu’s factory. Jianhu is a labor organizer from a China-based clothing manufacturer with Chinese bosses, who are as exploitative as Smith, which muddies the simplistic film’s US-centric White-Black dynamic. In the end, Jianhu steals a teleporter machine that the factory owners planned to use to lower shipping costs. One thing leads to another, and the workers of the Chinese factory win a strike. Corvette and her friends stick it to Smith, then open a community store. Yeah. If only.
Two things undermine I Love Boosters‘ political stance. First, a strong undercurrent of Nietzschean ressentiment drives the three boosters, especially Corvette. Corvette is a frustrated fashion designer who not only wants to be like Smith but to be Smith, if you will: at least to have the same level of accolades and money. What makes Corvette’s desire ressentiment is the film’s false presentation of the poor as happy and the rich as miserable.
Smith dresses in black-and-white, lives in a structurally deranged building that leans at a 45-degree angle, and is perpetually angry, though also a billionaire who controls a large share of the global fashion market. She also seems to be single and friendless. Corvette and her friends are tight with each other, laugh a lot, dress in flashy and campy clothes, and squat in an abandoned fast-food restaurant decorated with string lights and colorful tapestries.
The boosters live blessed lives. Apparently, life for rich people sucks, while poor people are happy, even though they’re perpetually struggling. It’s as if I Love Boosters is conveying: “Who wouldn’t want to be poor?” Actually, no one. It sucks being poor, and from our always-on-the-outside perspective, it’s pretty great being rich.
I Love Boosters presents an imaginary, fun, poverty-stricken world populated by those who are honest, hardworking, loyal, altruistic, and so on. As if to double down on this trope, the film ends with the boosters opening a community center, one that is clean, in a clean neighborhood, where there doesn’t seem to be the kind of poverty where one normally finds a community center.
The difference between the rich and the poor in this film has deeper ethical aspects. Mid-story, Corvette loses her idealized notion of Smith when she learns that Smith steals ideas from one of Corvette’s competition entries. What could this be but Smith not earning her money, which makes her ethically condemnable, in the very capitalistic ethics I Love Boosters purports to condemn?
Corvette, however, can be proud of her moral choices. She may be poor, but at least she doesn’t steal, at least not intellectual property, just physical property, but that’s just an act of “evening” the books. Finally, what is so good about selling expensive haute couture at a discount, except that as one participates in the capitalist market system, one can have a feeling of ethical agency by allowing the lower classes access to consume luxury goods, which undermines their luxury status?
Granted, one can read I Love Boosters in a deeply ironic manner. Maybe Boots Riley gave us the proverbial onion here, where one layer leads to another and to another, but I don’t think so. Near the film’s end, when Covette and the gang prompt a worldwide workers’ revolt, Smith says, “This changes nothing.” This may be the only honest statement in the film.
Jianhu’s factory wins a new contract. We are expected to pretend we don’t know the Chinese owners will close Jianhu’s factory, then outsource the work to smaller shops without labor contracts, and so on. Also, where does the material for the community center come from? Will Corvette be able to ethically source clothing at a low enough cost to sell it at a lower price? Will she dispose of her trash ethically? Offer her workers a living wage, medical benefits, and ample paid time off? Will she be able to survive financially without working 90 hours a week?
There are many other missteps in I Love Boosters. For example, during an amusing police chase, the teleporter brings a futuristic hyper-militarized police cruiser into the mix. Of course, the chase ends in a mad-dash, Keystone-Cops-like crash of the police cruiser. That’s too much make-believe, the usual “sci-fi crutch”, for a film that purports to address serious issues. It doesn’t encourage viewers to imagine a better world.
The film’s happy poor, miserable rich, its teleporter, and the global strike all reinforce reality: the poor are miserable, the rich are happy, teleporters for labor organizers don’t exist, and a union win here is often offset by numerous losses there. I Love Boosters fails as a revolutionary message because it invites us to laugh and enjoy ourselves as we watch a fanciful fable of social change – for those willing and able to pay the price of admission. When the film ends, we leave the comforting darkness of entertainment and re-enter the harsh light of reality.