Let's kind of not mess around here, because the festival wasn't.
Boots Riley, on hand and talking with Brian Tamm about opening night film
I Love Boosters. Interestingly, it was just the two of them for the most part - no Jon Bernhardt on the theremin as we waited for showtime, nor last year's Keytar Bear, and while the post-film discussion for some of these higher-profile movies would often be led from someone from WBUR or other local media, it was mostly Brian & Boots fielding the questions directly.
Which isn't bad; what we got was probably more interesting than a semi-scripted chat, especially because there were a couple times you could see Brian about to select another question before the director remembered something else. It worked out in large part because he had interesting answers to some of the more groan-worthy questions. For instance, "I'm a film student, what lenses did you use?", which often gets a bit of a groan because most folks in the audience aren't that technical, and unless the director has been a cinematographer (which Riley has not), he maybe doesn't have that much insight into the choices. He pointed that out while also saying "Technicolor 2" and one other, but also mentioning that those particular lenses can be difficult to get hold of, but the folks at Technicolor are big fans of cinematographer Natasha Braier, and not only rented her those, but also some custom lenses that they were saving for the right project. In addition, Braier did a custom attachment that Riley apparently couldn't describe too completely because she's patenting it that created some interesting effects when shooting the scenes with LaKeith Stanfield besotting Keke Palmer's Corvette, which replaced some things they were planning to do in color timing. It locked them into a certain look early, which they seemed cool with.
Interestingly, it tied into another regular question, the infamous "what are your influences?" He didn't give the exact answer I'd always be tempted to ("every movie I've ever seen"), but that was the gist, with him pointing out that everything had two or three contradictory impulses in them, to the point where you couldn't really separate what the original ingredients to the stew in his head were. The most direct influences were less inspirational than technical; there were apparently a number of scenes where they only built the back wall for budget reasons, and they showed the studios other movies where they did this to show it was viable.
The last question someone asked was about how he's a self-described communist but both of his movies have been these big productions for corporations, and how he felt about it. The answer kind of tied back to how, earlier, he talked about how the activist community he grew in treated the arts as something distracting from the real work of revolution, and how early in his career he actually stepped away from music because it didn't feel like something an adult did, getting back to it when he realized that a lot more people were getting his message through the music than specifically activist work.
Sorry to Bother You started as a more conventional sort of radical/independent cinema, but like his music, it got weird as he kept writing, and eventually it just wasn't going to be made as a small independent collective, and if you're going to make something that requires people to work on it for four months, there's got be someone paying them. He'd like to do something small someday, but that's just not how his creativity fires right now.
Anyway, a lot of fun, even before he started directing the staff and audience to get a very specific audience selfie. Movie opens wide on 22 May, and as he pointed out, the 2,000 screen opening means you've got to find your large audience right away, where there wasn't so much pressure on
Sorry to Bother You's platform.
I Love Boosters
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2026 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston 2026, 4K laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or
Riley's original album at Amazon
The fun thing about Boots Riley's movies, at least for some of us, is that they start out as broad
2000AD-style satire of something fairly specific, and then launch into much weirder orbit as they go on. Sometimes, it can seem like he's got more ideas than he has time to make movies, but at other times, you wonder if it's the point: That this awful, ridiculous thing is intertwined with a number of things that are even more terrible and insane, and you can't tell the story you started from without exaggerating everything else the same way. The result is often so maximalist as to make a viewer's head spin, but also a good time.
It centers around Corvette (Keke Palmer), a would-be fashion designer who instead runs a booster ring with friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), shoplifting designer clothing in bulk and selling it at affordable prices in open-air pop-us. She's a huge fan of designer Christi Smith (Demi Moore), but takes a job in one of her Metro Design stores to case it, on the rumor of $100,000 suits, and plans something bigger when she realizes Christi has stolen one of her weird designs she posted online. That's before a worker from Christi's Chinese factory, Jiansu (Poppy Liu), shows up with even bigger ambitions, and not taking into consideration the peculiar staff at the shop (Will Pouler, Eiza González, Najah Bradley), a dizzingly handsome catalog model (LaKeith Stanfield), or a motivational speaker (Don Cheadle) recruiting for a pyramid scheme.
Boosters seems kind of overstuffed, but perhaps by less than one might think. Its bright colors and crazy costumes which get switched up repeatedly during montages increase the intensity of what the audience is seeing but it's not actually more than they can take in, and almost every crazy new element and twist Riley adds has a clear place; with even the headier science-fiction elements (which he does in fact slow down a little bit to explain) pretty directly talking about blurring the line between homage and appropriation and synthesis & deconstruction in art. It's loud and bizarre and one can maybe lose track of what the goals are by the end of the film because Poppy's story is clearly bigger than Corvette's even though the latter is obviously the main character, but it never gets truly out of hand.
It's hilarious from front to back, though, with Keke Palmer trying to get out of Christi's bizarrely canted apartment some of the best slapstick since Ryan Gosling stumbling around a bathroom stall in
The Nice Guys as an example. The jokes and general strangeness come at a rapid pace, with recurring bits not quite in the background and an ability to do deadpan without necessarily slowing down and pausing. Riley has come up with a lot of gags that fit the setting and fits them into the script without necessarily twisting the story but letting them be weird enough that the audience can appreciate them individually. Similarly, there's a lot in the movie that is more tactile than it might be in others - the credits reference both miniature and stop-motion units - but without necessarily making a point of how practical effects are inherently better than digital ones; Riley has a good handle on how to have the medium enhance the material without itself taking the focus.
He's also assembled a cast that can work at his breakneck comedic pace but also give us some emotion under the frantic nature of it: Keke Palmer makes Corvette cool despite a lot of insecurity, and Demi Moore understands the assignment by making Christi the reverse, kind of a nervous dork under her brash entitlement (between this and
The Substance, it's kind of odd seeing Moore committing to weird parts because she always seemed such a carefully mainstream movie star in her 1980s/1990s heyday). Eiza González and Poppy Liu are both firehoses of exposition and activity, while LaKeith Stanfield is almost soothing as he calmly delivers some of the movie's most bizarre material. Nobody here is being subtle, but they all feel human and kind of well-rounded in Riley's weird world.
