Boots Riley has never made movies for people who want their politics neatly packaged. 

With his latest, “I Love Boosters,” starring Keke Palmer and LaKeith Stanfield, he did what he does best: takes a wild premise and turns it into a sharp argument about something bigger, in this case, class, labor, and profiting off Black creativity. The film, now in theaters, follows a group of women boosters in a fantastical Bay Area setting, where luxury fashion, sweatshop labor, and surreal spectacle all collide. 

Riley sat down with BET Current to chat about some of the meaning behind his larger-than-life film, “I Love Boosters.” He said the project grew out of his own life. “Being somebody that for many years was a broke rapper trying to stay fly, I definitely dealt with a lot of boosters in my life.” He also pointed out that he wrote a song called “I Love Boosters” about 20 years ago, which helped plant the seed for the film. 

What makes the movie feel so distinctly Boots is that the satire is never just for laughs. Riley said, “The larger thing is, we are all going through these struggles individually,” and the goal is to “collectivize our struggles.” He described social movements as a way of fighting loneliness, not just fighting against big bosses, and that idea sits at the film’s emotional center. The boosters are not only stealing clothes, they are trying to survive in a system that isolates workers and then blames them for surviving any way they can. 

The “I Love Boosters” cast is primarily women, the “Velvet Gang” (Naomi Ackie, Taylor Paige, Poppy Liu, and Eiza González). Riley said he centered women because, in his view, that’s what he saw coming up and he added that Black men would have drawn more suspicion in a store. Though viewers will soon see it’s the women in the film who are the ones carrying the story’s sense of style and purpose. The Velvet Gang’s heists are built around a fashion empire that exploits street style, steals designs, and depends on low-wage labor, while the women themselves turn redistribution into a kind of community service. Riley said, “I want to make a film that hopefully inspires people to get involved…” Riley said he wants folks to organize and rage against the machine. 

“I Love Boosters” is unhinged, funny, and visually electrifying, but underneath the color and chaos, it is asking something very real: what do people do when the system takes too much, too often?