With the release of his second film, “I Love Boosters,” this past weekend, Boots Riley has stuck with the same message he espoused in his debut feature “Sorry to Bother You” and his TV miniseries “I’m a Virgo”: the problem is capitalism, and there’s a lot of work done to distract you from recognizing that.
“There are movies where there’s some sort of vague rebellion, and by vague it might even be bloody, but who’s fighting who, and what is it about, is often obfuscating how power works,” Riley told TheWrap. “They don’t show that power comes from the working class making these commodities, and wealth being extracted from the sale of those things, wealth that the working class makes. That’s where power comes from.”
The left-wing filmmaker has never been known to pull his punches, whether in his hip-hop work with The Coup or in his work as a filmmaker. “I Love Boosters” is no different as it follows a trio of Black women in the Bay Area called the Velvet Gang that make ends meet by stealing clothes and shoes from pricey department stores and selling them in low-income neighborhoods at a fraction of the price.
Their plans to go after a chain run by top fashion designer Christie Smith, played by Demi Moore, see them cross paths with a Chinese woman trying to stop Christie from exploiting her and her fellow factory workers suffering in hazardous conditions, as well as Christie’s store employees trying to start a union after dealing with pocket change paychecks and 30-second lunch breaks.
This only scratches the surface of the many concepts and ideas “I Love Boosters” throws at the audience at breakneck speed, from dialectical materialism to a character that is secretly a demon (we’ll say no more about that). But one recurring gag that Riley uses as a satirical tool are news reports that the Velvet Gang watch with chyrons like “Crying Black Mother Demands More Police.”
Such segments may remind some viewers of the rise in crime rates that happened during and immediately after the Black Lives Matter protests and COVID-19 pandemic, and the news coverage that came with it. Residents of Riley’s hometown of Oakland in particular may remember the wave of reports in the Bay Area of robberies in 2021 and 2022, including viral videos of looters hitting high-end stores in San Francisco’s Union Square.
When asked if the media’s coverage at that time directly influenced “I Love Boosters,” Riley said that wasn’t the case. But he did cite reports from news sites like The Intercept and researchers like the Civil Rights Corps’ Alec Karakatsanis that showed how police departments and unions spend billions annually to send stories to local news stations and outlets about robberies and violent crime to influence opinion on public safety.
“They uncovered documents a few years ago that showed that all the police unions got together in the wake of the George Floyd protests and said, ‘Hey, let’s stop talking about, let’s stop defending ourselves for murdering people, and let’s make people feel that they need the police,’” he said. “They also worked in tandem with the Republicans, and decided to do this in places where they thought they could unseat whoever was the Democratic Party leadership there, so it’s hype. It is hysteria that is manufactured.”
By looping those media reports into “I Love Boosters” as word of the Velvet Gang’s heists spread across San Francisco, Riley wanted to send the same message that he delivered with the 2006 Coup track that his film takes its name from.
“The idea is that that has been around for a while is to villainize this group of folks who are trying to survive as the reason for society’s ills, as the thing that’s bringing down the economy,” Riley said. “If you’ve seen my show, ‘I’m a Virgo,’ I talk about how crime and poverty is necessitated by the economic system that we’re in, that you can’t have full employment under capitalism. Otherwise there’s too much power that the working class has, so they worry about the unemployment statistic going down too much.”
It’s why in both “Sorry to Bother You” and “I Love Boosters,” the unionization of beleaguered telemarketers at WorryFree and department store workers at Metro Fashion becomes a major subplot. “I Love Boosters” comes as Hollywood is going through its first labor contract cycle since the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and over the past three years there have been news reports and social media discussions among entertainment workers over whether the strikes were worth it.
Riley said he would never dismiss the frustrations that writers, actors and crew members are having with employment following 2023. But he did note that those frustrations were also felt in a pre-strike Hollywood with shorter TV series and diminishing residuals, and that doubts over whether Hollywood unions’ strikes were worth it have always followed every labor stoppage for decades.
“This is going to be part of the struggle to make things happen. There are ups and downs, and there are bumps, but you’re hopefully squiggling upward,” he said. “In order to have that upward motion you have to have these fights and tighten and regroup and keep going.”
To see more of TheWrap’s discussion with Boots Riley of “I Love Boosters,” which is now playing in theaters, click the video above.