The Boots Riley Doctrine I love the boosters This is best summed up by a recurring line of dialogue: “Now is not the time for nuance.” Events are exchanged on several occasions between members of a ragtag fashion theft group, as they attempt to avoid or deny personal contradictions. And they do so, in particular, in a film that not only attempts to highlight conflicting opposites, but also educate viewers about them through surreal satire. The film wears its heart (and mind) on its flashy cover, ensuring you know exactly what its politics are at every turn, usually through news stories or characters explaining the underlying themes practically down the lens. Reilly is perhaps the only openly Marxist director working in Hollywood — itself a contradiction he grapples with here — so the nuance of his perspective is commendably bold, at least in theory. In practice, it’s visually and emotionally incoherent, rarely entertaining, and squanders powerful ideas by making them resoundingly obvious and unpleasant.
Reilly’s style has the gonzo energy that worked wonders in his 2018 debut, the call center satire based on race and class Sorry to bother youtwo-thirds of a wonderful film supported by meaningful aesthetic and thematic developments. He brings the same audio-visual spirit to I love the boostersmaking it an entertaining introduction to his world of arts and crafts. However, these designs rarely elevate (and rarely are they elevated by) his sparse storytelling. The film follows small-time con artist Corvette (Keke Palmer), who admires luxury fashion designers and steals from them to make ends meet, with the Robin Hood excuse of making high-end clothing accessible to the common man. Made up of amusing but underutilized black actresses like Naomi Ackie and Taylor Paige, the Corvette sibling group, known as the Velvet Gang, engages in ridiculous shoplifting schemes that are usually laugh-worthy, as when Mariah’s character holds her breath to magically appear lighter-skinned, and in the process, attract less suspicion. It’s magical realism by way of maximum social commentary, as with Riley’s MO, and produces an occasionally exhilarating style, such as a chilling moment of realization captured with a Spike Lee-style sliding double doll and Hitchcockian zooms that decorate the space. But these fun little flourishes soon fall by the wayside.
The gang eventually targets one of the Corvette’s stars, the outspoken, high-strung and aggressive Christy Smith (Demi Moore), working at one of their exploitative retail outlets. This begins a crazy sci-fi heist saga whose oddities work individually at times, but taken as a whole are a headache. It’s certainly a great-looking film, helped by the fact that Smith’s stores only stock clothes of the highest color at a time — as store manager Will Poulter’s pedantic reiterates — allowing the visual palette some variety between scenes. However, the imagination behind Riley’s ideas rarely delves deeper than this ostentatious surface.
Corvette’s financial worries materialize as a massive ball of bills and eviction notices that rolls down the ramp, following it through the initial heist scenes like a boulder chasing Indiana Jones. But this terrifying vanity exists only to repeat what has already been proven about her life, before it disappears altogether. Variable gestures, such as Smith’s penthouse being tilted at an extreme angle, give Palmer some wonderfully cartoonish physical comedy. However, ideas like these seem to have been pulled out of the hat and dropped into Reilly’s creative process with no rhyme, reason or resonance in subsequent scenes. You may laugh in the moment, but in the long run, it’s difficult to pinpoint lasting meaning behind visual language.
Instead, a range of political ideas—surrounding race, housing, and policing, all wrapped in the politics of respectability—are presented through secondary and tertiary means, such as television screens broadcasting the news in broad, easily digestible parody and fliers that point to pyramid schemes as a path to financial freedom. Reilly’s ability to effortlessly embody the delusional propaganda of this world makes it all the more frustrating because the concrete details of the world itself are slightly tilted from ours (and sometimes literally tilted) resulting in an uninspired mockery of authority. “What if the thing you know is a little bigger?” It’s hardly a biting satire, let alone how bad this lack of visual ambition heralds in a film about fashionistas.
The story eventually expands to include a Chinese character, Jianhu (Bobby Liu), whose grudge against Smith concerns the treatment of her factory worker family in Qingdao, as the film attempts to connect the dots of capital and labor across the globe. However, its slogan is “Workers of the world, unite!” The foundations are severely hampered by half-baked genre tropes that are at once overly complex and oversimplified.
Without going into too much detail: a metaphysical device ends up at the heart of Jianhu and the Velvet Gang’s punk rock schemes, but its satirical function relies on the characters having to explain what they’re actually doing for most of the runtime, resulting in unwieldy, self-talking monologues about dialectical materialism. While this device is designed to give violent ideas a digestible visual form, the fact that it requires sustained exposition practically turns the film into an accidental metaphor for its failure to turn a concept into emotional or visceral ones. In the process, this gesture towards Trampled capital It ends up only appealing to those already immersed in Marxist or Hegelian theory, but not in any meaningful way beyond mere reference or basic recognition. It’s Globe Cheeto Communism.
How exactly does this work on screen? Usually, someone will explain the theory behind the aforementioned MacGuffin, and how it heightens contradictions or deconstructs elements of a scene (it might as well be magical), but very little of this is inherent in what’s on screen. It relies largely on dialogue, which gives Reilly’s images a heavy meaning—that is, when the camera condescends to actually catch the punchlines. Some of the film’s chase scenes, though rendered with great stop-motion artistry, go by so quickly, and with such haphazard editing, that the gags are partially hidden, if not completely missed. The entire film seems cut into pieces. It’s not polished enough to satisfy the average moviegoer, nor impressionistic or cluttered enough to be groundbreaking. Instead, it exists in a listless, distorted middle zone, seemingly landing there by accident.
In the heart I love the boosters It’s actually a simple but revolutionary idea: that fashion and creativity in general belong to the people, who can steal it from predatory corporations by uniting against them. It’s hard not to read this as a question of cinema itself, and how mainstream visual art in the United States is at the mercy of the profit motive. But the expression of this idea is far from extreme, as symbolic contemplations are bogged down by fleeting consequences. For example: The film uses the truly transformative sci-fi device of giving already disaffected workers some nicely worded picket signs, as if the proletariat were ready to protest, but were only held back by a lack of organizational conviction. In keeping with the tool that symbolizes the filmmaking process, perhaps only exploited workers need… I love the boosters To really get the hint. There is an inescapable self-importance to the film that supersedes what could be its actual importance; Instead of stirring the soul awake, it induces it to sleep, and it doesn’t do a particularly polished or convincing job of that either.
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I love the boost ★ 1/2 (1.5/4 stars) |
Ironically, Corvette’s story is articulated through the strict confines of capitalist cinema, where primary emotional concerns are tied to an individual protagonist and a by-the-numbers arc that seems entirely obligatory. What underscores her character is the idea that she’s lonely, something we’re told multiple times by her mysterious, comedic love interest (played with fierce commitment by Lakeith Stanfield, whose presence sends visual ripples through the fabric of the screen). We are told, and told, that the antidote to the Corvette’s isolation is to connect with others, which it ultimately does through organized rebellion. It’s a nice idea, but it would have been better if it had been shown and acted out rather than mentioned over and over again.
One could argue that the singular protagonist, with his or her individual goals, has persisted because it is a more interesting style of big-screen storytelling (or, you know, easier to sell in individualistic societies), but filmmakers in the Marxist tradition, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Jean-Luc Godard—the latter whose name Reilly practically invokes on screen—were responsible for creating new forms of montage through which ideas were captured. Suggestion, abstraction, movement, rhythm, or even cinematic arrhythmia. If these ideas have gone against the grain, it has been to open new paths to understanding what films can or can do and, by extension, how we can relate to them and to the world around us.
Through (perhaps unfair) comparison, I love the boosters It displays some of the most hackneyed deconstructions imaginable of a film backed by such spicy buzzwords as “heist,” “couture,” and “class consciousness.” Its only groundbreaking element is the upbeat, rousing score by the musical project Tune Yards, which creates momentum at times, and underscores some of the comic’s awkward cuts (the Velvet Gang walking out of a clothing store wearing dozens of stolen layers is raucous fun). But goodness, is it disappointing to have a filmmaker appear on screen to remind us what his film is not secretly about, before failing to live up not only to his political goals, but also some of the basic visual principles of narrative filmmaking. Down with the bourgeoisie? definitely. But does revolution have to be this dirty?
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