I Love Boosters is extremely stylized from the jump from writer/director Boots Riley, immediately establishing the film’s tone and the overall tone as the headliner opening night film of South by Southwest 2026.
The film threw the rowdy audience into a wild mix of satire, fashion, comedy, and social commentary in a way that only Boots can do. The director’s very hit-or-miss style that relies heavily on its normal aspects to build upon, establishes one of his best premises to date. The film follows a group of Boosters with a star-studded cast led by Keke Palmer as Chevrolet, as they rebel agains the status quo of this exotic Oakland landscape, fighting how workers and poverties’ creativity are limited in the modern economy. Boots Riley’s newest film, I Love Booster’s world premiere provided a colorful, eccentric, and often hilariously creative film whose ambition and style create a unique experience, despite the narrative becoming messy and overloaded at certain moments.
The story centers around the booster group led by Chevrolet as they operate their heist business and rebel against the economic system, using the boosting as a form of both survival, resistance, and self- expression. As the money trouble increases and tension between the CEO Christie Smith (played by Demi Moore) and the group grows larger, the group begin to take bigger risks using the new teleporter and upgrade machine they find in the company’s factories overseas. Their actions lead directly into the heist of their lifetime, more of an insurrection, as the group sabotages Smith’s fashion show in a fight for better pay, more respect, and a way to represent themselves. The machine they use helps them to achieve everything they hope for, the goal being raising awareness of inequality and worker rights through the chaos and disruption of a Boots Riley wild plot.
Along the way the film introduces multiple wild and wacky subplots that are sometimes strengthening the film and sometimes distracting them. Plots like $100,000 dollar suits that lead to a chase between our main characters and skinless people, animated in an incredibly creative way, or a giant ball of rolling debt that is present throughout the film with no real explanation, are polarizing ends of the positive Side plots. Stanfield’s demon love interest character is yet another example of a comedic and timely plot device that makes the film as quirky as possible yet not pulling away from the plot too much. The ideas put onto screen by Riley here are a rapid-fire narrative style that constantly shifts the audience’s attention. They are moments that define the filmmaker’s filmography but also creates a space between certain audiences and appreciating his films to the fullest, a common positive and negative of all his films, including I Love Boosters.
The film’s greatest strength, on the other hand, is that the style, colors, and comedic energy are extremely captivating, it’s an incredibly stylistic representation of Oakland and fashion that establish a world the audience clearly got down with from the beginning of the film. The comedy consistently pulls the audience in as well, as while things are chaotic they are consistent, characters like Will Poulter’s fall in line with the coloring and style while also being uniquely comedic. It’s a film that is a true example of taking the concept of fashion and using it as both a plot device and a stylistic statement brilliantly, a colorful eccentric acid trip-like experience that is incredibly successful at the style it presented to its packed audience.
On the opposite end the film’s weakness is primarily in the amount of things going on at once, it’s a risky and stylistic film but so many risks lead to misses and hits. I Love Boosters has so many concepts appear so quickly and disappear just as fast, that with the rapid switching between satire, comedy and narrative plot they can occassionally can pull the audience out of the story. While the central booster storyline works really well, and some of the bonkers ideas are really awesome and successful, not all of them are, making audiences treat the film like more of a mixed bag than they would hope.
In conclusion, off the base of another great KeKe Palmer performance, Boots Riley delivers an eccentrically fun, difficult to define and tough to categorize new film. The film is jam packed with wild concepts, exotic satire, and chaotic storytelling yielding this new and fun take on maximalist film making that is for sure something new for all audiences. While Riley’s world premiere was at best messy, the style, humor, fashion, ambition, and audience reaction make the film a memorable new release for the year. I Love Boosters delivers as a colorful eccentric Boots Riley film that may not fully land every idea, but delivers a wildly entertaining and creative experience, earning it a 77/100 from the Twilight Room.
Twilight Room Score: 77.8 / 100
