Boots Riley is back, baby. For the beloved rapper-turned-filmmaker’s second feature, he’s brought us a boisterous bounty of beguiling fun: I Love Boosters is Looney Tunes in live action, deployed to skewer brand-centric capitalism.
In Boots Riley’s world of Surrealist Socialism, his works tell stories about people against institutions. In Sorry to Bother You, it’s a man up against the grotesque machinery of corporate capitalism. In I’m a Virgo (an excellent underseen television show), it’s a giant-sized young Black man up against institutionalized racism and the corporate culture of hero worship. In I Love Boosters, it’s about how consumption is driven by corporate spectacle.
The film plays out as a mad fever dream. I Love Boosters is nauseous with color. The presentation of the thing grinds against the dull grays of modern filmmaking, not containing its ideas within an eccentric palette, so much as throwing buckets of paints at a canvas and letting the paint land where it may.
If deeply controlled filmmaking is a virtue, so too is the filmmaking of uncontrol. The perilous act of not composing things how they are meant to be, in the name of spurious rebellion, and the antithesis of conformity. For Riley, that becomes the modus operandi for I Love Boosters, which is bursting at the seam with concepts and ideas, all of them forward-leaning in a hyper-progressive way, without a single punch pulled. It all makes contact in one glorious mess of a movie — the absurdity of its outlandish construction being the point and the purpose.
If you’re going to make a radical film, then go all the way. Boots Riley has done it here. This is a madcap expression of Black Leftist thought, exuberantly exciting, exasperatingly eye-popping, and endlessly entertaining.
With an exceptional ensemble, Riley makes something that feels wholly original, insistent upon itself, and chaotically fun. The best hope for movies is not a big glossy space movie that’s deeply regulated, its art as an anti-capitalist screed that is flying off the handle, because that’s the kind of energy an unregulated system deserves in return.
Boots Riley is an exceptional original. There is nobody else making movies like what he is making. I Love Boosters feels spirited by a radically different time and place from now, as though it’s born out of pure, undistilled hope for what the culture can do, and how movies can remain a progressive force. When everything else is falling apart, we have Boots Riley to make a big, beautiful mess that sings with unrestrained freedom. I Love Boosters is a tea kettle going off, and the only way to stop the whistle is to seize the means of production.