Culture
Now Playing: ‘I Love Boosters’: a surreal social satire about shoplifters
By: Gordon Briggs
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“Booster”, in slang, is a shoplifter who steals high-priced items from a store to resell them. With his new film, I Love Boosters, provocative director Boots Riley crafts a clever, female-centered comedy about a group of ladies who aim to steal their way into success in the fashion business. The only way I can describe the film is as an absurd anti-capitalist surrealist comedy and one of the standouts of 2026.
I dare not spoil the weird places the film goes to, but I will reveal its premise. Here, we follow the “Velvet Gang”, a group of lady thieves that turns shoplifting high-end clothes into a radical act of community service. Their constant promotion of expensive clothes eventually draws the attention of an ultra-wealthy designer (memorably played by Demi Moore) who promises to destroy the gang.
A different, less adventurous movie would have focused solely on the business of shoplifting and probably followed a familiar heist-and-escape path. Thankfully, this film goes in a different direction. Riley gives his movie the stylistic freedom of a surrealist comedy.
For example, Demi Moore’s character has an office with a slanted floor at a 15-degree angle, making it impossible to walk normally. Not only does the slanted design serve as a cartoonish Looney Tunes-style obstacle, but it also allows the film to illustrate how its working-class characters literally can’t find their footing in the wealthy world of fashion design.
That aesthetic of deliberate exaggeration follows through with the film’s visual design. Most of the high-end stores the characters choose to steal from are meant to look deliberately artificial. For example, expensive designer stores are styled in distinct, thematic colors of green, yellow, or orange, making these settings feel uniform and monochromatic even as they promise to make customers stand out as individuals.
Of course, the film doesn’t shy away from an in-your-face social commentary about class and workers’ rights. Like the director’s previous work (Sorry to Bother You, I Am A Virgo), Boosters confronts how the pursuit of wealth at the expense of all else distorts our world and our own bodies.
For instance, there is a scene in which the employees discover that their paychecks are docked to cover the clothes they must wear while working. However, the movie doesn’t stop there. Riley will soon bring animation, fantasy, and science fiction into his critiques of capitalism, which will feel humorous and optimistic rather than depressing and dystopian.
In a question-and-answer session that followed the screening, Riley discussed having a journal where he keeps all his ideas and how he composed the movie like he would compose a song. I think that may be the secret to this film’s originality. Boosters has the rhythm of a gifted hip-hop lyricist, taking seemingly disparate elements and blending them into one satisfying whole.
Specifically, it never feels fully tethered to one genre, so it can walk brazenly into another. I guarantee there will be some that criticize the film for satirizing consumerism and corporate exploitation at the expense of narrative cohesion. However, I love the way Boosters deliberately rejects conventional storytelling.
This is a movie that knows it’s a movie and deliberately embraces the medium’s artificiality to craft something special. The film will be released in theaters this May, and when it is, I encourage you to seek it out. ★★★★