I LOVE BOOSTERS is a movie with ideas (arguably too many), style (in abundance), attitude (well earned), and an excess of exuberance. It works at a pace and a rhythm that can be challenging, could be annoying, could be hard to lock in on if you were distracted or in the wrong mood. If somebody hated it in the way I hated CRANK and DOMINO back in the day I would get it, though I think I would’ve liked it even then.

For a while it seems like every scene will be a conversation between characters ignoring an insane thing that’s going on that also requires your attention. An early example is the two main characters having a serious talk about their needs in life while shoplifting what I would consider to be an extremely conspicuous amount of clothes. They stuff their shirts so much they look like Klumps, but they continue their talk as they waddle across the parking lot to their getaway van, with little sense of urgency.

This is the second film from Boots Riley (SORRY TO BOTHER YOU), communist rapper turned writer/director who dresses like Paddington Bear. It’s a goofy maximalist comedy overloaded with genre tangents, convoluted sci-fi concepts, bits of stop motion and miniature models, not to mention acidic satire of capitalist exploitation, so it occurs to me now to call it Marxist Savage Steve Holland. But the truth is that what it kept reminding me of was Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Liquid Television, Alex Winter’s FREAKED – those rare pop culture miracles from a bygone era when the occasional gatekeeper saw the wisdom of giving corporate money and platforms to passionate communities of artists to take their swings at outlandish, quirky, wonderful things they really believed in.

Riley is proudly from the Bay Area, where this is set (though I guess it’s mostly filmed in Atlanta) and it has that regional arts scene spirit – a constant, outstandingly wacko score by Tune-Yards, typography by Olive the Other Reindeer illustrator J. Otto Seibold, stop motion by Mystery Meat Media (two animators who met working on MAD GOD), and I noticed Riley’s partner Gabby La La (whose 2005 album Be Careful What You Wish For… I still enjoy) for half a second in a scene where cars crash through a mall and ride up the escalator. It’s that indie spirit of getting every weirdo genius friend you have to contribute, and if you’re Boots Riley you have a lot of those.

The titular boosters are the Velvet Gang – Corvette (Keke Palmer, HUSTLERS), Sade (Naomi Ackie, SHELTER) and Mariah (Taylour Paige, ZOLA, THE TOXIC AVENGER, BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F) – who shoplift designer clothes to resell. Corvette is idealistic about selling them for cheap, and survives by squatting in an abandoned chicken restaurant. She aspires to make clothes herself and admires the work of celebrity designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore, PARASITE). But you know what they say: don’t meet your heroes, especially if you do it by hiding inside her personal barista’s cart and also your gang specializes in robbing her Metro Designers chain of stores and she figures out it’s you.

Corvette hears Christie mention $100,000 suits, but they can’t find anything like that in the stores, and they end up getting jobs at one of the locations as recon. Instead of learning where the expensive suits are, they experience having a shitty job. Their boss Grayson (Will Poulter, THE REVENANT) makes them wear clothes from the store that they have to pay for, and (maybe my favorite joke) gives them 30 second lunch breaks complete with starting blocks, starting whistle and stop watch. If they try to complain to him about any of this he turns the in-store dub step too loud to talk over. Their co-worker Violeta (Eiza González, BABY DRIVER, BLOODSHOT, THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE, ASH) is trying to unionize, but they have other plans.

I didn’t know about the sci-fi twist to the story, and its introduction gave me a big laugh, so exercise caution in whether or not to continue reading. One day while the staff is in the back being berated by the boss the entire inventory disappears. When they watch the security video they see a lone woman, Jianhu (Poppy Liu, Hacks), vacuuming up the entire contents of the store into a bag. They track her down and learn that she’s a worker from the Chinese factory where the clothes are made and she found the hula-hoop-sized portal device that brought her here. Now she’s using it to send the clothes to her brother (?) (Alan Z) to hold hostage until there are better conditions for the factory workers.

It’s a brilliant touch to unite the Oakland boosters with Chinese factory workers, and to use the portal gimmick to send them back and forth, literally removing the distance between cultures. Even better, Jianhu is funny and has a personality. Even in discussing her miserable job she’s a person who can have fun goofing around on her break or off hours. And the drab factory is made beautiful by the colors of dyes and fabrics. There is humanity to this portrayal, not just stereotypical foreign misery, a subtle but important gesture for solidarity across cultures.

The story gets crazier. The portal turns out to have two other settings, one of which is conceptual enough that I admit I couldn’t follow all of the jokes it sets up. There’s a car chase done mostly with miniature models (by Chris Warren, who worked on BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA and was recommended to Riley by Roman Coppola). Corvette’s unpaid bills and other stresses follow her around in a giant ball that rolls down streets smashing things. Sade is a devotee of a pyramid scheme guru named Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle, THE METEOR MAN), who works out of a furniture store so everyone sits in La-Z-Boys during his talks, and there’s a pay off to his subplot that not one person in the world would ever predict. The same could be said of LaKeith Stanfield (MILES AHEAD)’s character “Pinky Ring Guy,” and I won’t tell you about the tangent he sends us on other than that it’s very funny, surprisingly obscene, and utilizes creature FX by Alec Gillis (ALIEN 3).

I don’t think the trailers really conveyed what a cool looking movie this is. Hats off to d.p. Natasha Braier (THE ROVER, THE NEON DEMON) and production designer Christopher Glass (THE JUNGLE BOOK, SAMARITAN). If you had to pick one m.v.p. department it would probly be costuming, though – they are constantly changing looks, always outlandish and colorful. The costumes are so remarkable that I expect this to get an Oscar nomination even though the movie’s not doing great. (I believed that before I looked it up and learned the costume designer is Shirley Kurate, already nominated for EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, another movie this reminded me of a little).

Like NOPE and ONE OF THEM DAYS, I LOVE BOOSTERS is proof positive that Palmer has arrived as a movie star, pure undeniable charisma on screen. She has the rare gift of making the Serious Character Arc part of this broad comedy not feel forced or like it’s getting in the way of her being funny and charming. Ackie and Paige are solid support and then Liu shows up and steals the show. González has a smaller role but is in a good place where it seems like she’s in every other movie I see but I’m not expecting to get sick of her.

Moore is also great, not at all phoning it in, playing a particular type of entitled supposed visionary who doesn’t know she’s the villain but does some pretty spectacularly asshole things. (Joke spoiler: When she buys a company just to discontinue Corvette’s favorite candy out of spite it seems like a not-so exaggerated depiction of where we’re at with the wealth gap.)

I love the touch that Christie’s building is tilted. On the outside it looks like show-offy architecture, on the inside it’s a real hardship. I took it as a joke about people doing ridiculous things to seem elite, but it doesn’t really matter what it means, it’s just funny to see all her minions dutifully putting up with this shit, particularly the poor lady who has to come in with her coffee cart.

Because we all agree that shit sucks right now and art is real capital-I Important, there’s a tendency for critics to focus mainly on the message of a movie like this. There are things that need to be said, and keep being said, and we like when our art and our popular entertainment can be part of that. I went through this with Riley’s band The Coup. In the George W. Bush era I was buying their albums, going to their shows. It seemed like most of pop culture wasn’t appropriately responding to the times, but here was music more radical than me to balance things out. They had great album titles: Kill My Landlord, Genocide & Juice. They made headlines when the cover for Party Music, originally scheduled for September 2001 release, coincidentally showed them in front of exploding WTO towers. Riley wanted to keep it, but I honestly prefer the the replacement cover, with a burning gasoline martini and blinged out title.

I haven’t listened to those albums in years. I appreciate that they were there for me, and I should dig them out again and find out what they mean to me now. But at some point it started to feel like I was more into the idea of The Coup than the actual music, that I wanted to love it because of what it was saying but when I was honest with myself the music wasn’t moving me in the same way. Some of it was a little corny, for my tastes, at least at the time.

I only bring that up to say that that’s not the case with Boots Riley the filmmaker. He stands out more among writer/directors than he did among rappers. I do love the movie’s class consciousness, that we see these somewhat selfish characters have an awakening, that it’s ultimately an optimistic vision of all the different factions of the underclass uniting to demand a better world, with some specific demands, even. In fact it’s striking to see an outcome that’s superficially a generic happy ending out of BREAKIN’ 2 or whatever (everybody comes together to joyfully protest The Man and it saves the day), and know that it’s Riley’s sincere political goal (intersectional, international working class coalition organizing a general strike against the wealthy, exploitative ruling class).

HOWEVER, that truly isn’t the main thing that moves me about this movie! It’s really the whole weirdo aesthetic that’s meaningful to me – the circle of off-kilter musicians and artists tackling all this shit via the language of surreal, cartoony silliness. The medium is the message, a guy once said. They skewer the business practices of the fashion industry while expressing their love for the artform itself by having every character pop off the screen in a dozen wild looks. They separate the appeal of beautiful objects from materialism and status. They uplift humanity with gloriously imperfect, hand made special effects. They make it look cool to be yourself. And they made me laugh so many times. I think I love I LOVE BOOSTERS.