What should film do?

light I Love Boosters spoilers ahead

I Love Boosters
2026, dir. Boots Riley, 113 min.

What should film do? As in, what are the non-negotiable characteristics of a good film? I’ve been thinking about this question since seeing I Love Boosters, the new Boots Riley movie. Riley’s reputation, and his ideology, precede him. He occupies a unique position: a semi-mainstream filmmaker with leftist politics making films with leftist politics. What would someone of his political persuasion, I wondered going in, make with a Hollywood budget and Hollywood stars?

Keke Palmer, with her great humor and charm, opens the movie, her character Corvette scouting a club for stylish people to whom to sell her stolen pieces of high-end clothing. Corvette and her two friends, Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), make their lives work like this: boosting from stores, moving the goods. Corvette, we learn quickly, is a frustrated fashion designer herself. When she finds out that one of her original creations—a jumpsuit she confected to submit to a competition—has itself been boosted by the high-fashion impresaria who organized the contest, Christie Smith (a pitch-perfect, tone-deaf and unblinking, girl-boss Demi Moore), the three decide to exact revenge by clearing out her stores.

The premise is set, the characters are in place, enemies and heroes on their marks. Then, an absurd world starts to emerge around them. Corvette stuffs a pink velour tracksuit full of clothes and walks out of a store undetected, resembling a balloon animal. Smith’s stores, called Metro Designers, run according to a contrivance that allows Riley to saturate the screen with hysterical color: each location offers clothing in a single hue each month. When Corvette is stressed, a literal ball of her worries—bills pressed together with trash pressed together with eviction notices—rolls toward her. Smith’s studio is located in a skyscraper with floor plates so slanted it’s impossible for anyone other than her to walk in it without sliding toward the building’s glass walls; when Corvette sneaks in—Smith, paradoxically but predictably, is also something of a hero for her—she ends up performing Looney Tunes–style leg-revving motions to try to get out and falls flat on her face. As a way to avoid scrutiny during the trio’s boosting stints, Mariah holds her breath and appears lighter-skinned. TVs playing the news bear tongue-in-cheek chyrons like “Crying Black Mother Demands More Police” and “Upstanding Community Member Praises the Freedom of Lower Pay.” A black-eyeliner-ed LaKeith Stanfield skulks around looking deeply into the camera as heat haze blurs the image behind him.

It’s the too-much-ness we’ve come to expect from Riley, dialed up to eleven. But while some of these absurdist gags play successfully for laughs, others start to poke holes in the film’s scaffolding. If Christie Smith is a high-fashion designer, why do her stores look like Ross Dress for Less? If, as we come to find out, Corvette never actually submitted that design to that competition, how did Smith manage to steal it? These holes seem small, sure, but when a film strives toward the absurdist, it should (here we go) avoid inviting the sorts of questions that might make a viewer incapable of suspending disbelief.

At the same time, Riley dots the film with details that flirt with social realism. Sade needs money to raise her kid and joins a pyramid scheme. A pair of workers at a Metro Designers location complain to their boss about their paltry paychecks; he informs them that the price of the color-coordinated clothes he forced them to wear had been deducted from them. These moments chafe against the raucous extravagance of the film’s overall tone, and the resulting discordance makes it difficult for the film to settle into itself.

In fact, when it feels like Boosters is about to do just that, Riley blows it all up. And then he does it again, and then again. A major sci-fi element, whose function as a plot device and as a practical diegetic device relies on an overlong (and imprecise and, depending on whom you ask, incorrect) explanation of dialectical materialism, provides one of the movie’s late-coming turning points. The didacticism sits uncomfortably in the film, largely because it’s rather unexpected; I found myself cringing in my seat receiving Boosters’ version of political education, so much more ham-fisted than its predecessor’s, Sorry to Bother You, (which was, admittedly, already rather heavy-handed). If the introduction of this element is tedious, so is its continued use to further, and then resolve, the film’s central conflict. It’s also frustrating. Boosters premises what it presents as real internationalist solidarity on an impossible contraption, revealing a cynicism toward the politics its director claims to espouse.

Is this a sci-fi film? A comedy? A horror movie? A social realist drama? A heist flick? Riley can’t seem to decide but deploys tropes from all of the above. His particular brand of ambivalence—and his way of expressing it, stuffing the film with anything and everything regardless of how its elements play together—imbues Boosters with a sense of superficiality. It strikes me that Riley’s inherent overzealousness as a filmmaker might stem from that unique position he occupies. The film sags, and ultimately falls apart, under the weight of its director’s political convictions and the multi-directional expansiveness of his imagination. A good film need not fit neatly into a genre box, but it should (here we go again) be internally coherent.