Back in 2018, rapper and activist Boots Riley made his feature film debut with Sorry To Bother You. It’s a caustically funny satire about racial and economic disparity, following a telemarketer played by LaKeith Stanfield, who puts on a “white voice” to succeed. But it also has horse people. That was, for me at least, the point when Sorry To Bother You threatened to break the spell, even in an absurdist fun-house mirror of our fraught world that Riley makes his soapbox.

The brash film-maker doesn’t make it easy to love his gonzo agitprop. That’s part of his whole appeal, really. He dares us to resist and gets away with it because he’s such a compelling and necessary voice.

All this to say, Riley’s latest I Love Boosters, is just as outrageously hilarious and militant in its refusal to be enjoyed in the most conventional sense. Just when you’re getting into a comfort zone with his seductive heist premise, in which Robin Hood-like thieves liberate high fashion from the filthy rich, Riley throws in some demon cunnilingus; or Marxist notions like dialectical materialism, which he illustrates for the audience by depicting two people raw-dogging it.

OK, those hysterical bits are pretty digestible. I’m holding back from revealing just how absurd and baffling things get from there, at the risk of alienating or distancing in the same way Riley did in Sorry To Bother You. But the offending gags and detours always feel motivated by, and organic to, the movie’s rousing political ideas and cinematic resistance. And whatever it is that makes them confounding or frustrating, also makes sure we’re not being lulled into complacency.

Let’s just say I Love Boosters is welcoming of all resistance, even towards itself.

And Riley isn’t the first to play this game, of course. Trolling with politic intent is very Jean-Luc Godard, who Riley throws a cheeky reference to in I Love Boosters. Perhaps he’s acknowledging how much is borrowed from the French new wave film-maker’s radical masterpiece, Tout Va Bien. Just substitute Tout Va Bien’s Paris for the Bay area setting in I Love Boosters, and replace the hostile labour strike at a French sausage factory with a multifaceted international revolt against the fashion industry.

The boosters, led by Keke Palmer’s squirrely and irresistibly charming Corvette, are part of that revolt. They’re on a shoplifting spree, snatching designer fashion off the racks in retail stores, stuffing everything they can into their spacious outfits, all to be pawned later. We first see Corvette making off with so much under her pink plush jump suit that she looks like a Teletubby waddling out the store.

Corvette, Taylour Paige’s mischievous Mariah and Naomi Ackie’s stoic Sade are entrepreneurs who treat their venture like a movement. They’re building community among fellow boosters and appreciative customers. Mariah dubs it “fast fashion philanthropy”.

Their operation also puts them on the same side as the exploited retail staff and the Chinese sweatshop labourers who oppose Demi Moore’s silver-haired Christie Smith, a haute couture vulture capitalist who knows no ethical or corporeal bounds. Christie, who comes off like a more conniving, less commanding response to The Devil Wear’s Prada’s Miranda Priestly, has some creations that bend in a similar direction as those horse-people from Sorry To Bother You.

It’s Christie who dubs the unidentified thieves ransacking her stores “the Velvet Gang”. She also calls them “low-class urban bitches”. Corvette’s just flattered Christine knows they exist.

Corvette idolizes Christie. She once aspired to be just as successful a designer before hustling, as a fast way out of living in an abandoned fried chicken spot with Mariah. They take showers where the service counter used to be, the scent of extra crispy chicken remaining hard to shake.

I Love Boosters is loaded with several such sight gags, while boasting Riley’s knack for sketch comedy, especially during deliriously fun heist scenes. An early bit when Mariah holds her breath long-enough so she can turn light-skinned Black, just to throw off the white retail staff watching suspiciously, is peak Riley. Things get especially wild when Poppy Liu shows up, as a refugee from the unsafe Chinese factory producing Christie’s clothing. She joins the Velvet Gang, and brings a teleportation device to the action.

Riley gets the most out of his ensemble, which also includes Sorry To Bother You’s Stanfield as a sultry playboy who seems to melt the screen whenever he stares deep into Corvette’s eyes, and Don Cheadle, disguised under heavy latex, to play a greasy furniture salesman with a pyramid scheme preying on his own community.

But while every actor gets to make a brash and indelible impression, their characters can feel frustratingly limited. We don’t really get intimate with Corvette and her crew, to know and adore them enough to hang on when the plot goes haywire. So many of the movie’s characters are defined mostly by where they fall on the spectrum when it comes to race and capitalism, and their function in the movie’s messaging.

I Love Boosters keeps everyone at a distance, in full view of its political tapestry.

• I Love Boosters is out in US cinemas on 22 May with UK and Australia dates to be announced