I Love Boosters’s Boots Riley: ‘I’m not really looking to just put forward a message’

Filmmaker and musician Boots Riley isn’t satisfied if you walk away from his absurdist action-comedy I Love Boosters with just a message.

He isn’t about the message, although his films certainly have one. He’s more interested in what happens next, what happens once you leave the cinema and the story he’s just told you is percolating inside you. He wants to activate you.

I Love Boosters is Riley’s second film, an out-there caper about a group of professional shoplifters known in the American nomenclature as “boosters”.

In the movie, Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) hit a chain of luxury fashion stores owned by Christie Smith (Demi Moore), and they sell the goods to people in the community for a much lower price. It’s not a particularly enriching activity, the characters are squatting in an abandoned chicken shop.

With a rainbow visual palette and confident sight gags, I Love Boosters is a maximalist action-comedy that features a wild chase involving skinless figures, a Chinese factory full of exploited workers, a teleportation device and a mysterious man with a pinky ring and a penchant for soul-sucking cunnilingus.

It’s meant to be over-stimulating because that’s how Riley designed it.

“I’ve got to be way more awesome than the average film,” he told The Nightly. “You can disagree with my point of view, but you are not going to think this is boring. You are going to be interested in what happens at every turn.”

I Love Boosters is Riley’s second feature. He was known for his musical endeavours with hip hop and rap groups The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club.

In 2018, he expanded his artistic view to filmmaking, and released the surreal black comedy Sorry to Bother You, a movie about a young telemarketer (Lakeith Stanfield) who starts to do better at work after he puts on a “white voice”.

Sorry to Bother You, like I Love Boosters both explore one of Riley’s, a self-described communist, core concerns: the exploitation of the working class by the capital class.

“We need a world in which the people democratically control the wealth that we create with our labour,” he said.

You see that philosophy threaded all the way through both his films, he’s not being subtle about his perspective. I Love Boosters is about about people power.

By many measures, in the eight years between his two films, workers are having an even harder time. The wealthy have become wealthier and the gap between the rich and the poor have widened as cost-of-living pressures hit ordinary folk on multiple fronts.

But Riley remains emboldened. He didn’t feel as if he had to re-calibrate the urgency of I Love Boosters, or dial up the critique.

“The answer (to the problem) is still the same,” he explained. “Actually, what has gotten better since 2018 is, for instance, in the US, from 2020 to 2024, we had the largest strike wave in US history since the 1970s.

“People are looking for ways to change things. People are joining organisations, they’re organising on the job, and looking for those answers. So, I didn’t have to dial that part up, what I had to do was just keep pointing in the same direction.

“Cinematically, I dialled it up because I wanted a more visceral experience. Coming from music, you can have a lot of lyric nerds that are like, ‘Oh, this person’s lyrics is better than that’ but the average listener is like, ‘What does the beat sound like, how does it make you feel in the body?’.

“I’m trying to duplicate those things, those visceral feelings we get from different parts of music in cinema. I want to transpose that into cinema.”

That physical reaction is what Riley hoped would activate a viewer to make a difference, not by caring but by doing. That’s his plan. That you would watch I Love Boosters, take it in, feel it, and then make a call, organise a meeting, join a union, and fight back.

“I’m not really looking to just put forward a message. I’m looking to get people to want to get involved,” he said.

“My story isn’t over at the end of the movie. What I’m looking at, at the end of my movie, is what people do later. It’s not like people need to care, we all care, we all actually give a f—k. Most of us don’t think we can do anything about it.

“I’m not trying to expose something new, I’m trying to say, ‘here’s the problem, here’s the thing we can do’.”

Riley said he understood that the thing that holds workers back is fear. Many parts of the American system is outright hostile to unions, and even moves to form one can potentially get someone sacked – and in that country, losing your job could mean losing access to healthcare.

In Australia, union membership sat at 13.1 per cent in 2024, a slight uptick from 2022 when it was 12.5 per cent, but well down on the 40 per cent recorded in 1992, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

But, off the back of that “strike wave”, Riley is still optimistic, which is very much reflected in the spirit of I Love Boosters.

“A lot of that fear is overcome by us realising that other people are doing it because then we see real-time examples of people not just facing those fears, but having problems and overcoming them.

“When we fight, we don’t always win, but we know that in order to win, we’ve got to fight.”

I Love Boosters is in cinemas