Here is an entertaining, if very exhausting fantasy-caper about the fashion biz from Boots Riley, a madcap mile-a-minute melee of unadulterated ker-aziness. You might need a couple of ibuprofen and a lie-down afterwards. Demi Moore perhaps thought she was here getting a gamey starring role, comparable to her Oscar-nominated turn in the beauty-industry satire The Substance. In fact, the way the film is structured and edited, Moore is hardly more than a returning cameo, though a potent one.
She plays Christie Smith, a billionaire couture designer who has an office in a trendily designed city block which leans over at an experimental angle. Christie is the object of obsessive attention from “boosters”: supercool young outlaw women who, nettled by her arrogance, shoplift her clothes from upscale stores and sell them on at knockdown Robin Hood prices. They are Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), the latter having the superpower of, by holding her breath, turning herself into a white woman who is less likely to be challenged in a store; an interesting metaphor for what Frantz Fanon might have called black skin, white masks.
For all their savvy, the boosters have a soft spot for certain men in their lives, notably a charismatic community leader called Dr Jack (Don Cheadle), who is running a friendship self-help scheme that is actually a fraudulent pyramid scam. And Corvette is entranced by a laidback charmer and oral sex enthusiast played by LaKeith Stansfield, who turns out to be a demonic male succubus.
The boosters’ chaotic way of life becomes even more problematic when they realise they are up against what appears to be a rival thief from China; this is Jianhu (Poppy Liu), who wields a magic portal ring the size of a toilet seat which sucks all the clothes out of a store and teleports them back to China, where underpaid workers have been making them under scandalously bad conditions. Jianhu is protesting against Christie Smith’s exploitative employment practices – and by being forced to make common cause with her, the boosters find themselves in unexpected territory: the moral high ground.
This is a cacophonous, chaotic film which delivers a sensory overload of almost incoherently frantic onscreen activity, and it can be hard to take, though it is often funny. There’s enough material here for a 12-episode streaming show, and that may be where Riley may wish to take it – although it’s quite an experience at feature-film length, a compressed spectacle of hellzapoppin’ uproar.
• I Love Boosters is out on 30 October in the UK, and on 12 November in Australia
