'I Love Boosters' is an Afro-Surrealist Sensation
Major spoilers for I Love Boosters below
I am not someone who you might typically spot at any opening weekend of any film – not because I don't want to support filmmakers I love, but because that's what my risk profile and assessment allows for, or rather, doesn't. But sometimes, once in a blue moon, a project is made that demands I play the game and show up so that things like it can continue to be created and have their due time in the spotlight.
It's by sheer luck that a theater a 17 minute car ride away from me was playing I Love Boosters for its Masked Mornings showtime (a once a week affair in which a morning showtime is made masks required, all staff and patrons, no concessions are sold during this time and capacity is capped at 25%), so not only could I attend during the opening weekend, I could do so without compromising my risk assessment plans and in a theater (sold out, it hit 25% capacity!) full of other people showing up masked. I'm not going on about this for scene setting purposes before I talk about the film, btw. It's all connected.
I chose to adhere to the dress code set for the film, in head to toe monochrome (pink) and I shared a photo on my ride to the theater on twitter (which Boots Riley himself shared!! squee!! I coordinate the color of my KN95 masks with my outfits, and fortunately, I dress largely in pink these days, and I keep pink KN95’s on me. I made sure to include my fresh matching pink mask in the photo I posted, along with mentioning the fact that I was only able to participate in this act of support because, by sheer luck, I lived 20 minutes away from a place that does a once a week masked showing, and the showing this weekend happened to be I Love Boosters and I also happened to have safe and reliable transportation to and from the showing, as well as not having to work on this day. That’s a lot of pieces that landed me in that seat, but it happened. It’s important that someone like me, a perpetually broke, immunocompromised, disabled (Black + Intersex + Trans + Fat) person had access to a piece of art like this and it’s only possible, in very large part, to a stranger's commitment to solidarity to another stranger. I Love Boosters is a film that writes not a love letter (with all its focus on the passion of the moment) but a truthfully loving outline (with all its complications, flaws and unpredictability) of what it means to be in solidarity with one another as friends, as workers, as strangers.
The second the film starts my senses are overloaded in the best possible way – there is so much movement in the first shots of the film. We’re in a dark club but everything and more importantly, everyone, is so well lit. its kind of bullshit in 2026 its still so immaculate to me when a film manages to not only light Black people well, but light them in special, magical ways that make our skin reflect the gem tones that live underneath it, that so many filmmakers and photographers and artists of all mediums fail to give the consideration to depict.
There is instant chemistry between LaKeith Stanfield (who is billed as, and who I will refer to from here on as ‘Pinky Ring Guy’ or just ‘Pinky Ring’) and Keke Palmer (Known as Corvette in the streets, but to her loved ones as Cassandra), and this chemistry remains throughout the entire film, no matter the dimension their relationship or our knowledge of him glides through.
Corvette is wearing a baby-blue/turquoise bedazzled sequined jersey in the opening scene that is absolutely to die for. There is a lot of very high end conceptual avant-garde fashion in the film as well as a lot of very original, DIY high fashion on display in the film. It continues to be a feast on the senses in this way. The characters, while all recognizable to us as the viewer, transform constantly on film and never show up in the same outfit twice.
The titular font used for the ‘I Love Boosters’ title card, promotional posters and the credits sequence is absolutely delicious and I could stand to see it plastered everywhere.
I frequently had the thought – is this surrealist or is it just a perspective you don’t think people like us are capable of imagining?
I am knocked further into my seat when one of our first introductions to our main character Corvette, who I will now refer to as Cassandra for personal preference going forward, is through a nightmare she has that jolts her awake, one that prompts her best friend, Mariah (played by Taylour Paige, a fav of mine) to tell her that she was talking in her sleep – again.
I’m gonna try not to do too much personal shit in this write up, because more than anything, I want you all to be encouraged to see this film as soon as possible. I want myself to be in all my writing, but I don’t wanna get lost in the introspection that I forget to talk about the art. I’m floored by this level of attachment I've formed to Cassandra in just a few short minutes and how easily I am able to see myself (and so many others I have loved) in her. This only increases when, after Mariah asks, she expresses a little more about her fears and where she thinks the nightmares might be coming from.
She’s afraid (she feels it, a part of her knows it to be true) that people don’t really see her, not the sincere her. This is a part of why I opt to call her Cassandra in my writing and not Corvette, even though we only hear Cassandra a few times in the film vs Corvette a dozen or more. At the very start of the film she introduces us to the conflict she’s having internally – she says that no matter what she does, the image of her is so strong that even her direct words cannot override it. This conflict is something that could be described by double consciousness, a term popularized by W.E.B Dubois that refers to the ‘peculiar sensation’ of ‘always looking at one's self through the eyes of others’, specifically the bind of being an ‘American citizen’ and a Black person and descendant of enslaved African people. People define Cassandra the way that they want to define her and the way that they have chosen to define her is through the image they most commonly see of her, a shallow image they convince themselves is far more meaningful that anything she could define of herself, for herself. To the world she is Corvette, the booster. She wants money, she doesn’t care about authority, she loves clothes, glitz, glamour, stuff! That’s it and that’s all. Pretty girls love shiny things. Or rather, urban Black bitch doesn’t want to really work for anything she has. This is another point of my attachment to Cassandra. I think the double consciousness of existing as a disabled intersex Black trans/feminine woman is the thing that causes me the most ire these days. And it’s not just the treatment, but the gaslighting about it. Being defined and then being told I haven’t been, that the only thing that controls how I’m seen is what I do but what I do gets defined by others so how does it really work? You just accept being Corvette and hold Cassandra closer to your chest. That’s not what everyone sees regardless.
One amazing thing about I Love Boosters is how bunk any claim that the film encourages anyone, particularly minorities, to steal from stores becomes so quickly into the film. It doesn't take 40 minutes to get us to their first boost, and during the boost there is a casual, albeit important, conversation being had during it. It’s something that happens casually, almost mindlessly. They flee the scene and don't want to be caught but this film is not about police, or policing – it’s about what the police protect. So in that, they exist as an agent of the ruling class to protect their interests and their material and that’s as far as they exist in this film. Enforcers of the borders for the wealthy.
When the film's antagonist Christie Smith (played by Demi Moore in what I consider to be her best role yet) is asked about the gang of boosters (coined Velvet Gang)she says they are, “Low class urban bitches, with all due respect to urban bitches.” This quote blew me away because it told me everything I needed to know about Christie Smith. Is she an open piece of shit bigot who hates anyone unlike her? Absolutely not. She is too smart for that. She is a businesswoman, an artist, a visionary – she knows better than to potentially alienate a population of people who still have buying power like that. This is further depicted in the fact that even after Christie says this on her live, Black women still shop at her stores even admiring some of her work (that she stole from Cassandra) by saying she ‘knows what the streets want’.
The chemistry between Pinky Ring and Cassandra is palpable from the first moment they spot each other and everything in the editing and structuring of the scenes they share with each other really highlight how destabilizing his presence is to Cassandra. It turned me on when I saw it at first, and then it almost immediately became a sinister feeling. I wrote in my little journal in the dark ‘he slithery, her world trembles when he looks at her but I want her on solid ground’.
I am reminded of this year's Met gala theme ‘fashion is art’ constantly throughout the film, particularly how much I feel that largely every single person failed to actually meet the theme, interpreting it far too literally and not well, interpretively enough. Fashion is art because it dresses the body, the body as a medium is a unique and important surface for art because the body carries meaning. All of our bodies are loaded with meaning, what we give to it and what we don’t. We arrive again at another theme of this film – definitions. Who gets to define what. Who gets to define who. And when you exist in a body that body, no matter its shape, is defined by something. What is it saying? What do you wish it said instead? Fashion is a way we take this meaning and mold it to our own desires of definition and meaning. There are a couple of met gala attendees that I think nailed the theme in these terms – Cardi B in Marc Jacobs (inspired by Hans Bellmer’s “The Doll”) and Jeremy Pope in archival Vivienne Westwood (the piece itself a part of a set of two, this particular piece titled ‘Slave to Love’). Both of these pieces highlight the politicization of the body, particularly of the Black body, of the double consciousness our forms exist within and how dressing our forms is (fortunately or unfortunately) never entirely apolitical. Boots Riley and costume designer Shirley Kurata, intentionally or not, highlighted the politicization of the Black body in such incredible ways throughout the film that it will live in my dreams for a long time. Cassandra, after a boost, escapes from the store and walks entirely effortlessly as her jumpsuit has been filled to the brim with stolen goods, to the point where her body has taken an entirely new form – fashion as art, overconsumption as statement of a reality made absurd through its fashionable art. Boots Riley is a genius, I believe. He is a fashion genius and a visionary of film.
A part of why I do not want to represent I Love Boosters strictly as a love letter is because it is so wonderfully critical of everything it seeks to represent. Everything catches a shot. To me, that’s the realest kind of love but I know (partially due to my social unpopularity) that criticism, especially thorough, even kind criticism isn't really seen as any kind of love people value these days. So I won’t call it a love letter, even though these are the kinds of love letters I like to send.
One piece of beautiful criticism comes in the form of the character Dr.Jack (played by Don Cheadle, who I did not recognize until the very end of his time in the film, I say lovingly), the leader of a ‘community project’ called ‘friends being friendly’. It’s multilevel marketing but for love and belonging and community. Again, Boots Riley is a genius. I am so grateful and made more hopeful and dedicated to his messages in this film because of the ways he opted to display the common pitfalls of organizing and reaches for overwhelming solidarity. A ‘community’ that boasts everything and shows nothing is a device akin to an adult summer camp. A form of light social policing that keeps you controlled and agreeable. I love being kind and I love having friends and being friendly. But that is not all it takes to build a community, to have a community, to be a community member. That is multilevel marketing disguised as community. Where you can be accepted and rejected based on arbitrary standards of identity relation and the ways you show up in the lives of others is only a fraction more than a letter on a report card used, again, to check if you earn your membership another cycle. This is not community, this is a business disguised as family, stagnation disguised as growth, policing described as self held and community care. Friends being Friendly. Until you disagree with something the leader said. Until you don’t like the way they speak to you and you say something about it. Until you keep insisting over and over and over on a voice that is yours and the space to write your own narrative. Lol. Community.
“Now I am the one with crumbs falling out of my mouth and that’s what I want for all of you. Community love.” - Dr.Jack
Physical comedy and stretching the limitations of the human form and ability. Mariah has a trick where she can hold her breath and become white – this reminds me of the plot of Sorry to Bother You where the main character Cassius (who goes by Cash, another commonality between the film and its main characters re: Corvette:Cassandra) ascends within his profession by utilizing a fake ‘white people voice’ to make others more comfortable engaging with him. Here, Boots opts to highlight that antiblackness is truly something that you can’t lightskin your way out of. If the room has got two Black women in it and one is lighter than the other – they’ll find a way to follow you both. The distraction factor woman has gotta be white or else the scheme just doesn’t pan out. It takes so much out of Mariah to pretend, and she can’t even speak when she does. She's literally gotta hold her breath. Perhaps a metaphor for the ways that more lightskinned Black people who are able to (or perceive themselves as able to) pass as nonblack are under a very strict program in order to continue having access to such perception. It can all go away the second you let yourself go even a little bit. And then you’re just another Black bitch.
Christie is a beautiful and layered antagonist because she is not stupid. She is a very smart woman who has chosen to opt out of doing anything materially helpful for this world and instead chase a never ending stream of praise and income for her highbrow pseudo intellectual creativity and ingenuity that is merely impracticality disguised as innovation. A woman who could do so much to change the world, change the material conditions so many are living in within this world, who has chosen not to, and feels justified in this choice as her intellectual gifts are, in her mind, a greater service to the world than her philanthropy could ever be, oh and of course, none of the people she steals designs from or the Chinese workers she pays horrid factory wages to and condemns to declining health and cancer in old age, could ever understand the way that she sacrifices to make it all happen.
A testament to her impracticality disguised as genius is her horribly slanted apartment and corporate office – she's managed to get used to it and slides less than everyone else and expects them all to just get it too. Use your core, or something. Nothing that she does as a designer is truly organic and this is displayed throughout the film in subtle ways every single time she is in a scene. She absorbs from the things around her, no not in the way an artist is generally told to ‘take inspiration’ from their sights and surroundings and experiences, but literally. It’s fitting she wears glasses because they might as well be Meta Glassess. She's downloading everything and nothing you say is confidential – it can all become commodity. Christie Smith is an ode to the fact that we simply should not trust those who accept idolatry. A word is a weapon. Even your favorite color isn’t safe.
Eiza Gonzalez plays Violeta, another underpaid and heavily overstimulated retail worker ends up heading the call for overhauled work practices at Metro Designs, the stores owned by Christie that boast a different monotone exclusive theme and inventory – if you want a different color, go to a different store. The manager of the store she works at and that Velvet Gang ends up working at too, is Will Poulter in an all-time comedic performance as Grayson.
One painful point of relation between Cassandra and I is that although it is very clear to both herself and everyone close to her that Christie Smith stole one of her designs, Cassandra didn’t actually submit the design to the contest that Christie ran, nor did she really do anything with it beyond posting it on instagram sharing that she made it. Ugh. My tummy hurts. A phrase that’s been written on every single vision board or new years resolution or long term goal chart ive made in the last 5 years is some rendition of ‘if you don't write it/make it/create it someone else will’ because for the past five plus years i feel ive been doomed to continually see myself both defined and stolen in the registry of public life. I do not get to be the me that I seek to declare myself as but still, I show up and I speak anyways, but this showing up is bundled up in a sacrifice that everything i allow to be visible can not only be defined but straight up ignored but consumed and later regurgitated by a voice perceived as more worthy than mine. It's a kind of doom that Boots Riley depicted perfectly in this film.
Every single time a piece of Cassandra is stolen or rewritten in her narrative her world crumbles. At one point her destabilization from this theft of self is depicted as the world itself opening up beneath her, she falls through it, descending into a blazing inferno where a horrid monster gobbles her up whole. Swallowed by the earth itself. I wish I could say this is unfamiliar. I am feeling it a lot these days as a person who can’t seem to shut the fuck up and who can’t stop seeing the patterns no matter how hard I try to look somewhere else.
Subtle things that make the world feel so real even amidst the surrealism like the presence of lipstick stains on the straws they drink from.
They talk about Pinky Ring Guy (LaKeith Stanfield) and say ‘he was reading an actual book’), which gives me the energy that he is meant to represent a preformative man who parrots the symbols of safety but does not embody such. Shortly after this we get one of the most incredible and unexpected monsterfucking scenes I have been blessed with in my life. A creature engaged in an act with a lot of meaning and layers that can serve to open any casual viewer up to the world of taboo desire and all the ways abstinence from pleasure is utilized as a tool to liberate or control depending on what side of the rule you exist on. It is deeply impressive that Boots Riley was able to create such a salient metaphor for the ways that our libidinal desires can be used against us, tools of distraction and deconstruction that exist at a site where we are inclined to learn toward this freedom (the body and its impulse reactions), without ever once skewing toward a conservative puritan view of sex or sexuality. The sex, the yearning, the desire is not the site of conflict or contention with Pinky Ring, it’s what the potential of giving in represents at a time that is so important to Cassandra, and to the people she is in community with – notably, not Pinky Ring.
The introduction of science fiction elements in the form of a device with multiple otherworldly functions is handled quite flawlessly. I get confused easily and nothing in I Love Boosters lost me – the dialogue and what was showcased explained enough that I was fully grounded in the surrealism of the moment, regardless of my weak grasp on time-space and teleportation.
There are moments in the film where CGI is used but it is the kind of CGI that reminds me of when I first started really getting into film in the early 2000’s, it is crude but in the most intentional way. There are set designs that are built practically in either miniatures or as backdrops to a scene that are all immaculate and inspired. If you somehow got a silent copy of this film, you would still be in for a buffet for the senses.
Not only does Christie steal Cassandra's designs, she ends up mimicking her, pretending that she has the same favorite color, for the same reason Cassandra does. A reminder that the elites are not your friend. Everything is content. Even your favorite color can become a weapon and a wound that opens up the earth beneath your feet. It doesn't matter who said it first or who said it more earnestly, just that she had more eyes on her when she said it, so it makes it more true than your truth could ever be. We are a tree that has fallen in the woods that everybody can see and nobody can hear because we have to pick ourselves up before the noise complaint will come to bite us. Double consciousness is a reason for the hustle we can’t escape.
Propaganda is right in front of us all the time and a lot of the people who are manipulating us are open about it, but we have decided we would rather be manipulated than free. You cannot get revenge on billionaires. There is no revenge or reform, only deconstruction – back to the start. Every commitment to deconstruction followed through on is a bid for connection. We are a part of the same earth. Christie says to Cassandra at one point toward the end of the film, “Anything I take I make my own. You're not fighting me, you're fighting yourselves.” and Cassandra replies, “That means we can win.”
We are not in a struggle against automatons, extraterrestrials or cryptids. We are in a struggle against other human beings with a vested interest in convincing us they are something other than that, something greater than the collective of ‘we’. Collective recognition of the Me in You and the You in Me is the way we get the world where we can all really live, and honor the earth. We can be together. To have it all we cannot reform we must deconstruct and rebuild anew, to have everything first must come a nothing. An acceleration toward a nothing so we can have it all, together, because we can. There is enough. An acceleration toward nothingness is an acceleration to solidarity, to collective power, to freedom for all.
I've been saying to myself, to pages in my journal, to friends on my private twitter, in conversations about the past that I should have named myself Cassandra. I say it because I feel my life has followed a specific kind of pattern socially. I say something, I observe something, I am crucified for it, I am punished for it and then later, this very thing I observed, I noted, I spoke on and was punished for, is revealed to be true by one or many or all of the people involved in making sure I received punishment for my outburst. I have written in countless poems and fictionalized short horror stories with self inserts that my life is populated by a begging a constant fucking begging to be believed. About who I am, about what I want, about the things I say and what I myself believe. I do not know if I will ever get that or if I am simply doomed to see patterns and suffer punishments for what will later be written into the public record as history under another name. I do not know if it matters. I think the point is something else, probably. Either way, I’m happy to have a reason that isn’t the Greek mythology of Cassandra to associate with that name. I think I might actually want it as a part of my own now.
At the end of this showing people stood up and clapped. This is the first time out of the hundreds (I used to get out to the theatre a lot more pre-2020) of films I've seen in theatres where that’s happened. It’s also the first time I've sobbed sincere happy tears.
I've never been to Oakland, but I have been to one part of the Bay Area in California, but from the art i’ve consumed over the years, this was so clearly a shoutout and adoration piece for the Bay Area, for the culture that Boots Riley was raised within and that so many other Black artists continually find inspiration for some of the greatest works of our time through experiencing.
This would be an amazing double feature with Sinners, as both films highlight the importance of cross-cultural solidarity, particularly that between oppressed workers in east asian countries as well as american immigrants from east asia and diasporic Black Americans. There is a long history of solidarity between us that is worth being reminded of and keeping alive in our contemporary collective consciousness. The Velvet Gang and Jihan come together for ‘smaller’ more petty reasons — revenge and resources. But ultimately, they all choose the collective over these individual goals because choosing the collective allows for the freedom to pursue sincere desires when we really allow ourselves to dedicate all we have to give to realizing this freedom for everyone, even when it seems like choosing the collective is picking it over a friend or a lover, because freedom is always choosing you and choosing me and choosing all of us that truly have nothing to lose but our voices (our expression, our art, our truth and our insistence on a definition that is our own), and our chains. If we never let them take the first, we can accelerate toward losing the latter, setting our device to deconstruct and smelting the chains down to iron that we can use to rebuild the world where we all get to be free and live in definitions of our own creations.
I am so glad to be alive at the same time as Boots Riley.
I am minimally editing this essay to get it out ASAP. It could flow better but I want it out as soon as possible because I want to encourage everyone to see this as soon as possible and as many times as you can. So like don’t be an ass about my prose or whatever the hell.
