To the right-wing commentariat, just about anything can be “Marxist propaganda.” They use it as a generic term of derision for things that seem to be outside of their reactionary political project. Mr. Rogers Neighborhood? Marxist propaganda. A high school social studies class on the Civil Rights Movement? Marxist propaganda. The Avengers? Marxist propaganda.
It’s all bullshit, of course. Marxist ideas are not being smuggled inside insanely profitable $200 million superhero movies made by Disney, the publicly traded corporation founded by a notorious union-buster. If you want to see actual Marxist propaganda, look no further than Boots Riley’s new film I Love Boosters.
Riley would not dispute my characterization of I Love Boosters; a recent New Yorker profile of the hip hop artist turned director is titled “Marx Brother.” His previous projects, like 2018’s Sorry to Bother You, a magical realist comedy about the plight of gig workers and telemarketers, are not exactly subtle about their labor politics.
I Love Boosters is named after a song from Riley’s 2006 album Pick a Bigger Weapon. “Boosters” in this case means “shoplifters.” Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) are The Velvet Gang, a notorious group of boosters who target high-end fashion outlets such as Metro Designers, a chain run by Christine Smith (Demi Moore). The semi-professional shoplifting gig is not exactly lucrative, but it’s the best they can do in recession-hit Oakland. Corvette, for example, is squatting in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant while she saves up to pursue a career in fashion design.
But honestly, boosting is its own reward. The gang loves nothing more than to torment Christine, an Anna Wintour-like figure who lives and works in a skyscraper that is tilted about 30 degrees to one side. When Christine declares a crackdown on shoplifting, the gang decides to pull off one more massive heist which they believe will bankrupt Metro Designers and make them all rich. Since they’re already fashion experts, they easily get jobs at a Metro Designers, where they discover that Christine has ripped off one of aspiring fashion designer Corvette’s more out-there creations. They also discover something even stranger, a mysterious woman named Jianhu (Poppy Liu) who is using a high tech device to steal clothes from Metro Designers at an industrial scale. When the gang tracks her down, they discover that she has been using a stolen teleportation device originally developed by Christine’s company to save on shipping costs. Jianhu’s plan is to hold Christine’s inventory hostage to gain concessions in an ongoing labor dispute with Metro Designers’ Chinese factories. But once they get their hands on the device, the gang discovers that it’s not just a teleporter. It can also change things in the real world through the power of dialectical materialism (look it up). Armed with this most Marxist of weapons, the Velvet Gang sets out to defeat Christine while highlighting the contradictions of capitalism. And they might just set off a worldwide revolution on the way.
I Love Boosters showcases Riley’s many strengths as a filmmaker. He has a fantastic eye for color, a Felliniesque sense for combining the mundane with the fantastical, an enviable knack for perfect casting, and a restless sense of visual experimentation. The film is a constant swirl of chaos which Palmer does her best to anchor in the real emotions of frustration and alienation familiar to anyone working in the late capitalist hellscape that is Trump’s America.
The biggest problem with I Love Boosters is that it is overstuffed. Riley wants to get every one of his crazy beautiful ideas on the screen at once. Lakeith Stanfield, who held down Sorry To Bother You so well, appears as a scorpion-like cunnilingus demon who is macking on Corvette, for example. For the first two acts of the film, the chaos is exhilarating. By the end, as the medium and the message collide, it becomes exhausting. But still, in a world of generic slop passing as art, this is an actual auteurist vision, realized by some of the best craftspeople in the business. And who knows? You might even learn something.