Screening at SXSW: Boots Riley’s ‘I Love Boosters’ |
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Screening at SXSW: Boots Riley’s ‘I Love Boosters’
Unfortunately, this messy heist film’s clunky messaging supersedes its storytelling.
The credo of Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters is best summed up by a repeated line of dialogue: “Now is not the time for nuance.” It’s exchanged on several occasions between members of a ragtag fashion heist group, as they try to avoid or deny personal contradictions. They do so, notably, in a film that tries not only to highlight clashing opposites but also to educate its viewers about them through surrealist satire. The movie wears its heart (and its brain) on its bedazzled sleeve, and it ensures you know exactly what its politics are at every turn, usually through news chyrons or characters explaining underlying themes practically down the lens. Riley is perhaps the only overtly Marxist filmmaker working in Hollywood—itself a contradiction, with which he wrestles here—so the anti-nuance of his perspective is commendably audacious, at least in theory. In practice, it’s visually and emotionally incoherent, and seldom entertaining, squandering potent ideas by making them thuddingly obvious and unpleasant.
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Riley’s style has a gonzo energy that worked wonders in his 2018 debut, the race-and-class-driven call-center satire Sorry to Bother You, two-thirds of a great film buoyed by purposeful aesthetic and thematic evolutions. He brings that same audiovisual verve to I Love Boosters, which makes for an entertaining intro to his bubblegum, arts-and-crafts world. However, these designs seldom elevate (and are seldom elevated by) his scattershot storytelling. The movie follows small-time con woman Corvette (Keke Palmer), who both admires and steals from fancy fashion designers to make ends meet, with the Robin Hood excuse of making high-end clothes affordable to the average Joe. Corvette’s sisterhood, consisting of amusing but underutilized Black actresses like Naomi Ackie and Taylour Page, are known as the Velvet Gang, and they engage in ludicrous shoplifting schemes that are usually worth a laugh, like when Page’s character Mariah holds her breath to magically appear more light-skinned, and in the process, attracts less suspicion. It’s magical realism by way of maximalist social commentary, as is Riley’s M.O., and it yields the occasional debonair technique, like a moment of fearful realization captured with a gliding double dolly à la Spike Lee and a space-warping Hitchcockian dolly zoom. But these fun little........