“When someone makes a drama and the drama is not like real life, it’s because they’re taking all the humor out of what happens in real life.”
Boots Riley, who has just made this statement, is animatedly gesturing with his ’70s- style shaven sideburns in Beverly Hills, California. When we meet, he is wearing a striking cartoon-like hat paired with square-brimmed glasses fit for a mad scientist with the wired brain of a genius. He wears this unconventional getup while he is leading a set.
The visceral auteur with an infinite vision is about to bring forth I Love Boosters, his second feature film. The Oakland-raised artist has always reconstructed the scenery of the life that surrounded him, which has grown into imaginative, emotional punch lines in his work. His latest film welcomes comedic commentary on the globalization of fashion.
Boosting is shoplifting that is not so ill-intentioned as Corvette (Keke Palmer) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) cement it into their brand messaging for their group tagline: “Fashion. Forward. Philanthropy” (with an F). Alongside Sade (Naomi Ackie), they all aim to give back to their community by planning a coup d’état against an elite conglomerate that Corvette secretly aspires to join. Born of necessity as an anti-capitalist activist group, the “Velvet Gang” steals and stunts wearing the bold outfits within the monochromatic imagination of Riley’s doll-like in-store sets.
I Love Boosters was shot all over the San Francisco Bay Area, from Hayward to Oakland. “The stories that the media tells us about what’s going on in the Bay Area are often devoid of the class struggle that’s happening,” Riley said. “Maybe they might show a protest, but it’s isolated and not connected to this other thing that’s happening. Or, somebody was boosting here, but they won’t talk about it in terms of the poverty that exists.”
I Love Boosters is wonky and audacious; when Riley is up on the plate, he most certainly swings. An homage to his hometown and the cultural diversity of the cities that surround Oakland and the far corners of the Bay Area. I Love Boosters criticizes commercial fashion brands for committing robbery by subjecting their overseas manufacturers to poor conditions and tagging high prices on eco-deadly garments. The makeshift Velvet Gang’s onscreen chemistry is eccentrically magnetic, and their indistinct antagonists, played by Demi Moore and Don Cheadle, are fragments of Riley’s inventive, hallucinatory mind.
Palmer serves as an executive producer of the offbeat film produced by Neon. Riley and actor LaKeith Stanfield are reunited onscreen; they worked together on Riley’s 2018 film, Sorry To Bother You, another examination of corporate extensionalism.
Riley’s storytelling proclivities for a workplace satire match his affinity for otherworldly fashion. “Oftentimes, I’m at vintage places and just looking for weird stuff. Usually, if an old lady would like it, I might be able to rock it really well.”
The filmmaker’s expansive narrative landscape is an offshoot product of the Black and fantastical media he consumed within his early life. He pays his respects to Toni Morrison for her literary prowess and the way she depicted vivid characters, and to Spike Lee for the way he painted human life in a Black Brooklyn neighborhood in Do the Right Thing.
“One movie that had a big effect on me was this movie with Don Knotts. It’s an animated movie where he turns into a fish called The Incredible Mr. Limpet. He falls into the water, and then they just show his silhouette in the water spinning around, turning into a fish,” Riley shared. “As a kid, I watched a lot of Jerry Lewis movies, but as I got older, I liked Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Emir Kusturica, Gaspar Noé, and Leos Carax.”
All of the inner workings of Riley’s wild imagination align with the auteur’s psychedelic, dreamscapes approach to world-building and relationship with evocative cinema.
“If you fall in love, all of a sudden, the colors look different. They look brighter. You see things, you think about things that you hadn’t thought about before,” concluded the I Love Booster’s director-writer.
“The world seems different. In my films, I want the audience to have that same experience. I want them to discover not only what is going on and what’s going to happen, but also what the story is about. I want them to feel that sense of discovery.”
I Love Boosters premieres in theaters on May 22.