Can Boots Riley’s ‘I Love Boosters’ Make the Revolution Sexy?

Before long, their cartoonish heists get them caught up in a rivalry with the elitist fashion mogul Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whose lofty diatribes about her art cloak a conservative, tough-on-crime political agenda. The Velvet Gang, as the boosters are known, join forces with retail worker Violeta (Eiza González) and Chinese garment worker Jianhu (Poppy Liu) to take down Smith through a surreal scheme that unspools reality and unveils a heinous secret.

Using art to fuel a mass working-class movement has been an ambition of Riley’s since he got his start as a rapper in the early ’90s with his group, The Coup. With I Love Boosters, the 55-year-old activist-turned-director arrives at a new height of his career: His first wide-release feature, with a star-studded cast, backing from prestige production company NEON and a $20 million budget, all to create a technicolor, eye-popping ode to the power of collective organizing.

Riley has spent years giving talks about how, a century ago, labor strikes forced politicians to create basic social welfare programs that helped lift working people out of poverty. He wants to bring that back. “We need a mass, militant, radical labor movement that uses the withholding of labor as a tactic and strategy to affect policy change,” he says. With today’s income inequality drawing comparisons to the Gilded Age, I Love Boosters is Riley’s bet on whether he can make the revolution sexy, and whether he can use the ultra-capitalist Hollywood system for his decidedly anti-capitalist ends.

“What gets people to get involved in things is not anger or fear,” Riley says. “It’s optimism that there’s something that they can do. And so that’s what my writing normally is, is pointing to what actually can be done.”

Boots on the ground

Long before he touched the microphone or picked up a camera, Riley was a community organizer. Born in Chicago and raised in Oakland by activist parents (his father, civil rights lawyer Walter Riley, fought segregation in the South and later participated in San Francisco State University’s Third World Liberation strikes), Riley was 14 years old when neighborhood organizers recruited him and other youth to support Watsonville Cannery workers. He passed out flyers and helped organize rallies as the workers waged an 18-month strike that became one of the biggest organized labor victories of the 1980s.

Riley’s activism didn’t stop, even as The Coup inked a major record deal and made their debut with the funky yet militant album Kill My Landlord in 1993. In the mid ’90s, Riley helped lead a group called the Young Comrades to protest an anti-cruising law that effectively criminalized Black youth hanging out at Lake Merritt. (A 1996 Oakland Tribune op-ed chastised them for “rudely and repeatedly” interrupting city council meetings.)

His frontline work continued in the 2000s, when he organized guerrilla hip-hop concerts to protest a state law that increased criminal penalties for juvenile offenders. In 2011, during Occupy Oakland, he helped coordinate tens of thousands of people in a general strike that shut down the Port of Oakland. And in the years since, even as his star rose in Hollywood, he’s taken to the streets at teachers strikes, the Hollywood writers strike and anti-ICE protests.

“The idea then was the same as my idea now,” Riley says of his evolution, “which is to get the working class involved in class struggle.”

The absurdity of the rat race

In I Love Boosters, Riley operates in a different mode than the political theorist version of himself that gives erudite speeches at rallies and in Democracy Now interviews. As a screenwriter and director, he’s weirder and looser, submerging viewers in a candy-colored world where he amplifies every indignity of life as a low-wage worker. The effect is hilarious, yet maddening enough to make viewers want to join the characters on the picket line.

When Corvette and the Velvet Gang get jobs at Christie Smith’s fast-fashion chain, 30-second lunch breaks that start like track-and-field races leave them panting; their paychecks amount to chump change because they’re forced to buy designer outfits to wear on the job. Later, when we meet Jianhu, we find out the Chinese factory workers are sick because Smith orders them to distress denim by sandblasting it with absurdly large amounts of industrial chemicals.

“This is part of Boots’ genius in that he wields satire as a genre really expertly,” says Poppy Liu, whose sharp-tongued Jianhu is an unexpected moral center of the film.

Corvette loses her housing and is squatting in an abandoned fast-food restaurant, unable to see the bigger picture of class solidarity because her mounting financial problems pose the more immediate threat. Her fixation on Smith feels personal, tinged with admiration and jealousy. It’s Jianhu who realizes that joining Corvette in her vendetta can lead to massive gains for exploited laborers.

The two characters’ dynamic embodies a lesson about coalition-building that Riley learned in his organizing days. “People start making sacrifices for each other because they start understanding how intertwined things are,” he says. “It starts with understanding that a situation in which people have solidarity is helping your own personal interests as well. And from that grows a different kind of consciousness.”

“Honestly, those themes were the biggest thing that got me excited about the movie,” Liu says.

Making class solidarity accessible

Other cast members had different entry points into the sometimes heady political ideas in I Love Boosters. For Eiza González, it was personal conversations with Riley about her family in Mexico; she shared that her mom was one of eight children from a humble family that couldn’t afford basic necessities like healthcare.

González’s cool-girl Violeta is a secret wonk who delivers a passionate monologue about the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism at a crucial turning point in the film. She mustered the fire for her role as conversations on set turned to how, across cultures and borders, working people struggle to get by as the 1% makes record profits from their labor.

“He weirdly built the characters with us without us realizing, if that makes sense, which was amazing,” González says. “It was a different experience, but once you were in the character, you were believing it at its core.”

While LaKeith Stanfield, who starred in Sorry to Bother You, shares many of Riley’s viewpoints on class inequality, he brings a wackiness and levity to I Love Boosters that helps make the film accessible and entertaining.

“Anytime I can just be a part of a Boots Riley movie, I mean, even if I’m playing someone’s toe, I’m glad to be there,” Stanfield says.

His character is a supernatural being who uses his oral sex skills for nefarious ends, and he brings much-needed hilarity to a story that’s largely about labor.

“I hope that people can be entertained and have a good laugh and gawk at the spectacle,” Stanfield says, “but also maybe look into some of our industry and … what effects we have on the global market and global labor. And also maybe take a look at, hopefully, the importance of us being a unit and being together.”

Thorny questions around Hollywood money

Making a wide-release feature film with a not-so-secret socialist agenda has its challenges — chiefly, getting it funded.

For all who are eager to praise Riley’s activist bona fides (“He’s always been an anti-capitalist baddie,” Liu says), some observers on social media have criticized his willingness to take money from the film’s executive producer, Annapurna Pictures founder and Oracle heiress Megan Ellison.

Ellison hasn’t donated to political campaigns and tends to finance left-leaning prestige cinema. But her father, the far-right billionaire Larry Ellison, and her brother, David, head a media empire that controls a massive swath of television, film and social media, including Paramount, TikTok and, if a pending deal goes through, Warner Brothers Discovery. The senior Ellison has been accused of wielding his power to silence President Donald Trump’s critics. So the source of Megan Ellison’s wealth has drawn scrutiny from some would-be supporters of Riley’s work.

Has Riley ever felt tension around using the Hollywood system to tell his anti-capitalist stories? He says no.

“I’m not trying to be like, ‘Oh, I’ve got a pure way for you to take in your entertainment,’” he says.

“From the theater chains to the streamers, to the studios and funders big enough to do something that’s big enough for millions of people to see — you’re there,” he continues. “You’re mixed up in everything.”

While Sorry to Bother You started its theatrical run in only 100 theaters, I Love Boosters will hit 2,500 screens Memorial Day weekend. After its world premiere at South By Southwest, Riley has been building word-of-mouth hype by throwing small screenings on college campuses, where he’s shown up to talk to students personally. But grassroots campaigning alone can’t create the magnitude of impact he’s aiming for, he says.

“If you don’t have a goal of revolution, then it’s easier to say, ‘Hey, I just need to have my hands clean of this, and let me make a commune in the woods,’” he says.

Riley is hopeful that the kind of radical social change he’s spent his life advocating for will come. He points to the post-pandemic strike wave, during which the U.S. saw a 280% increase in strikes in 2023 from the year before. More recently, in January of this year, Minnesota unions and activists mounted a one-day general strike to protest ICE abuses in their city, inspiring similar actions across the nation. For Riley, it’s only the beginning. With I Love Boosters, he wants to remind viewers of their ability to stand together and tip the scales of power.

“I want the result of millions of people getting involved in class struggle, joining organizations, all of that,” he says, “because that is the only thing that can actually change the situation.”