I Love Boosters (2026) Review – Boots Riley’s Bonkers Fashion Caper Is the Year’s Wildest Satire

Our Rating: ★★★★☆ 7/10

Eight years after Sorry to Bother You announced Boots Riley as American cinema’s most gloriously unhinged satirist, he has returned with a film that makes his debut look restrained. I Love Boosters is a fashion-world caper about three shoplifters who steal from a monstrous fashion empire and sell the clothes back cheap — and then it keeps going, past satire, past farce, into territory where a magical reality-bending device, a soul-stealing seducer and a villain in colour-blocked villainy all feel perfectly logical. It is frequently hilarious, sometimes exhausting, and never, ever boring. If you like your comedies polite, stay away. If you like them to swing for the fences and occasionally hit the scoreboard, this is your film.

This review is spoiler-free on the film’s wildest turns. Half the fun is watching Riley’s imagination detonate in real time.

Quick Facts: I Love Boosters at a Glance

The Story: Steal From the Rich, Sell to Everyone Else (Spoiler-Free)

The Velvet Gang are “boosters”: Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) steal high-end clothes from the boutiques of fashion mogul Christie Smith (Demi Moore) and sell them on at prices ordinary people can afford. Corvette has a personal vendetta against Smith, whose Metro Designers empire deals in aggressively monochromatic clothes and aggressively self-promoting branding, and the gang’s heists are equal parts protest and livelihood. Their world is Riley’s version of San Francisco: garish, slanted, deliberately unreal, where costumes and sets look intentionally artificial and every shop floor feels like a stage set for a con.

The caper plot — get in, get the goods, get out, stay ahead of Smith and her colour-blocked store manager Grayson (Will Poulter) — would already be enough for a sharp comedy. But Riley being Riley, the film swerves in its second half when a rival booster, Jianhu (Poppy Liu), appears with a device that can alter reality and teleport anything through its aperture, instantly outclassing the gang’s old-fashioned shoplifting. From there the film stops being a heist movie and becomes something stranger: a fable about what happens when theft gets so efficient that it stops being theft at all, and about who gets to own the things everyone wants. A late appearance by LaKeith Stanfield as a supernatural seducer with an unusual method of claiming souls is the kind of idea that either delights you or sends you for the exit; this review counts it as a delight, albeit a deranged one.

The film’s weakness, acknowledged even by its admirers, is that the final act loses the plot it spent an hour building. The satire gets so big and so strange that character threads fray, and some viewers will feel the film stops making sense just when it should be paying off. That is a fair criticism, and it costs the film a higher score. But Riley’s films have always preferred a glorious mess to a tidy shrug, and the mess here is frequently magnificent.

Performances: Palmer Holds the Madness Together

Keke Palmer as Corvette — Palmer is the film’s anchor and its star, and every reviewer seems to agree on this even when they disagree about everything else. Corvette is an aspiring fashion designer as well as a thief, and Palmer plays her with effervescence, comic timing and a sincerity that keeps the film’s wildest turns grounded. She also sings on the soundtrack. In a film full of people going gloriously over the top, Palmer is the one performance that never loses the character inside the chaos.

Demi Moore as Christie Smith — Moore is clearly having the time of her life as the megalomaniacal fashion villain: pantomime, preening and utterly committed to Smith’s belief in her own genius. It is a big, boo-hiss performance in the best sense, and her scenes with Palmer crackle with mutual contempt.

Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige and the ensemble — Ackie shines as Sade and Paige brings steel to Mariah, whose unusual ability (she can hold her breath and pass more easily in high-end shops) is one of the film’s many cheerfully absurd details. Will Poulter is hilarious as the effeminate, colour-blocked store manager Grayson; Poppy Liu is a scene-stealer as Jianhu; and LaKeith Stanfield, Eiza González and a heavily prostheticised Don Cheadle all add to the sense that Riley called in every favour and every friend for this one.

Direction and Technical Craft

Riley directs like a man with no interest in realism whatsoever, and that is the film’s visual signature. The Metro Designers stores are monuments to monochrome excess, Smith’s office has oddly slanted floors, the gang’s heist disguises involve bold masks, and Tune-Yards’ score pushes everything toward joyful disorder. Cinematographer Natasha Baier shoots it all in bright, saturated colours that make the film feel like a cartoon for adults — which, in spirit, it is. The costumes and production design are the real stars of the craft: every outfit in this film is a joke, a statement or both.

The trade-off is coherence. Where Sorry to Bother You kept its strangest idea for the final stretch, I Love Boosters lets strangeness take over the whole back half, and the editing sometimes struggles to keep the satire’s targets — fashion, consumer culture, capitalism itself — in focus. Some critics found the film exhausting by the end; others found it exhilarating. Both reactions are understandable, because the film contains both experiences, sometimes in the same scene.

Music and Sound

Tune-Yards’ score is a perfect match for Riley’s sensibility: restless, percussive, funny and slightly unhinged, with Palmer’s vocals adding warmth. The sound design leans into the film’s artificiality — every shop door chime, every heist gadget, every crowd gasp feels slightly too loud, slightly too performed — which suits a film about performance as commerce.

What Works and What Doesn’t

What we loved:

• Keke Palmer’s star-making, chaos-holding lead performance
• Demi Moore’s gleefully villainous fashion mogul
• The most original production design and costumes of any comedy this year
• A satire with real targets — fashion, consumerism, who owns style — not just jokes
• The sheer audacity: no other mainstream comedy this year takes swings this big

What could be better:

• The final act loses the plot it built so well
• The strangeness will alienate viewers who want a straightforward caper
• Some supporting characters get lost in the ensemble sprawl
• The film’s targets occasionally blur under the weight of its own invention

Box Office: A Cult Film in the Making

I Love Boosters opened in UK cinemas on 30 October 2026 after its London Film Festival run, and early audience response has been exactly as divisive as the film deserves: peaks of enthusiasm, pockets of hostility, and very little middle ground, with online ratings splitting between high scores and low ones. No verified UK opening gross was available at writing time, and none is reported here. What seems certain is the film’s afterlife: this is a film built for rewatching, arguing about and quoting, and its reputation is likely to grow long after its cinema run.

Verdict: Should You Watch It?

Yes, if you have any appetite for controlled chaos. I Love Boosters is not a perfect film — its final act wobbles, and its weirdness is not for everyone — but it is a genuinely original one, powered by a wonderful Keke Palmer performance and a director who would rather fail spectacularly than succeed safely. Go in expecting madness, and you will have a marvellous time.

Our rating: 7/10 — A bonkers, brilliant-in-places satire whose final act loses the plot but whose star, style and audacity make it essential.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is I Love Boosters about?

Three shoplifters — Corvette, Sade and Mariah — steal clothes from fashion mogul Christie Smith’s empire and resell them cheaply, until a rival with a reality-bending device upends their whole operation.

Who stars in I Love Boosters?

Keke Palmer leads as Corvette, with Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Demi Moore as Christie Smith, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter and Poppy Liu.

Who directed I Love Boosters?

Boots Riley, who also wrote it, following his debut Sorry to Bother You (2018).

When was I Love Boosters released?

It opened in UK cinemas on 30 October 2026 after playing the London Film Festival; it had an earlier US release in 2026.

How long is I Love Boosters?

114 minutes, with an 18 certificate in the UK.

Is I Love Boosters a sequel to Sorry to Bother You?

No, it is a standalone film, though it shares Riley’s absurdist satirical style and LaKeith Stanfield appears in both.

Is I Love Boosters suitable for families?

No — it carries an 18 certificate in the UK for strong sexual content and language, and suits adult viewers.