Poppy Liu doing the splits on the red carpet — not an elegant walkway, but a rug crammed inside an Oakland storefront full of sweaty reporters — wasn’t the only lovably chaotic moment at the West Coast premiere of Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters during the San Francisco International Film Festival.
At the Grand Lake Theatre Tuesday evening, there was also a marriage proposal during the after-screening Q&A; lots of oral sex jokes from LaKeith Stanfield (in the film, he plays a demon who uses his skills to nefarious ends); and, of course, many rants about the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism. As for the splits: Liu explained that she felt awkward for being late, and it was the only logical thing to do in a moment of “neurodivergent panic.”
The evening’s wild antics mixed with heady political philosophy mirrored the tone and pacing of I Love Boosters itself, which follows an all-woman shoplifting ring, the Velvet Gang, who resell designer clothes from high-end Bay Area stores to make ends meet and provide a community service of “fashion-forward (f)ilanthropy.”
The boosters, Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylour Paige) and Sade (Naomi Ackie), get caught up in a rivalry with the elitist, foul-mouthed fashion mogul Christie Smith (Demi Moore), and eventually join forces with retail worker Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez) and Chinese garment worker Jianhu (Poppy Liu) for an epic scheme that defies the laws of physics.
Boots Riley, who spent decades as a frontline community organizer and political rapper before becoming a filmmaker, has never been shy about the bold aims of his art: “We need a mass, militant radical labor movement,” he told KQED on the red carpet. And although worker organizing is an explicit theme in I Love Boosters, Riley makes its union politics go down easy with skillful comedic pacing, technicolor visuals and the boosters’ runway-worthy looks.
