Boots Riley’s new film, I Love Boosters, presents a striking critique of capitalism through a dazzling, surreal fantasy world. The movie centers on three young women who steal racks of clothing from a chain of high end fashion stores and resell them at bargain prices in their community. These “boosters” see theft as both a form of survival and as a community service, making overpriced fashion accessible to the masses.
Meanwhile, the obscenely wealthy owner of the fashion company rages against the boosters while performing her own, legitimized forms of theft. She steals wages from her retail store workers by forcing them to buy her merchandise to wear as a work uniform. She steals from the health of the Chinese garment factory workers by forcing them to work in hazardous conditions. And she even steals the ideas for her newest fashions from young, aspiring designers. As director Boots Riley put it, “Theft is not outside of capitalism; it’s what capitalism was built on – and not even, like, metaphorically. The bourgeoisie was no different in that they stole land, stole minerals, stole labor. But that theft is thought of as legal.”
The contradictions of capitalism are elevated to hilarious absurdity in this kaleidoscopic dreamscape. For example, one of the protagonists is intermittently stalked by a massive, rolling boulder made up of her unpaid bills and eviction notices.
Aided by a magical teletransportation device, the boosters, retail workers, and garment workers ultimately unite forces in an action-packed display of international working class solidarity, complete with a claymation car chase.
I Love Boosters is at once aesthetically captivating, laugh-out-loud funny, and a thought-provoking analysis of how our world works and how we could change it. Riley states of the film, “I want you to engage with it as a piece of art and come to some conclusions, and hopefully it inspires you to go out and help make a mass, militant, radical labor movement… We need to try to get control of the wealth we have created with our labor.”
