This article by Carter Moon originally appeared in his Substack, and is republished here with his permission.

Collapsing the distance between time and space to reveal who really steals from who.

The following contains extensive spoilers for I Love Boosters

One of the most pervasive media stories after the pandemic and post-George Floyd was the supposed epidemic of shoplifting ripping retailers apart. My local CVS makes you pass through multiple layers of security to get deodorant, seemingly all to prevent the elderly disabled man who routinely begs for food outside from being able to pilfer anything. This panic about shoplifting reached its zenith when mediocre comedian Bert Kreischer filmed himself crying inside an emptied-out Rite Aid, convinced it had been taken over by “looters.” In reality, Rite Aid was hollowed out after 1,600 lawsuits were filed against it for its contributions to the opioid epidemic. Kreischer’s meltdown perfectly exemplified a gullible upper class person’s ability to take in out-of-context videos of smash-and-grab robberies and be convinced of an epidemic, all while ignoring the very real criminality and harm perpetuated by our corporate class.

This dynamic is the heart of Boots Riley’s latest absurdist heist comedy, I Love Boosters. The film follows a trio of friends who are highly effective shoplifters known as the Velvet Gang, who steal from luxury fashion outlets and sell the wares at a discounted price in Oakland. He explains in a recent interview with The Wrap that there has been a coordinated push by police unions in the wake of the Black Lives Matter uprisings to create “a hype, a hysteria” around shoplifting to justify the necessity of continuing to fund police departments at their outrageous sums. This dynamic is explored in-depth in Alec Karakstanis’ book Copaganda, in which the civil rights attorney shows readers how police and the media intentionally skew reporting to present police as the sole solution to social problems. In the book, Karakstanis demonstrates that Chicago employs 55 public relations professionals, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department employs 42, and NYPD employs 86. These are people working around the clock to create the sense that crimes like shoplifting are a persistent crisis and that only harsher policing can address it. This, despite the fact that retail analysts admitted in 2023 that chains had “overexaggerated” the extent of the shoplifting “crisis.” The CFO of Walgreens even confessed “maybe we cried too much” about shoplifting.

Part of what makes Boosters so effective is that Boots doesn’t deny that shoplifting exists. Yes, there are people who take goods from stores and sell them at a steep discount. But far from the luxury clothes stolen in Boosters, some of the most commonly shoplifted items in America are laundry detergent and baby formula, in other words the essentials of modern life that are priced too high for significant portions of the population. The organized theft and resale of goods is therefore not random, selfish anti-social behavior, but rather the meeting of a need that the free market has no interest in meeting itself. The Velvet Gang steals clothes because they love clothes, but also because they’re dead broke and living in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant.

The leader of the Velvet Gang, Corvette (played by the always electric Keke Palmer), has a love-hate relationship with Christie Smith, the CEO of Metro Design, the chain she steals from. Christie refers to her gang as “low class urban bitches,” but also commands a fashion empire that Corvette aspires to, since she herself has dreams of being a fashion designer. Through a series of chaotic events, Corvette and her friends manage to get a job at one of the stores Christie owns, with plans to really case the joint and steal everything at just the right moment. Corvette becomes even more motivated to steal from Christie when she sees one of her own designs being sold in Metro Design. But two layers complicate this plan. The first is that the previous employees are having their wages egregiously stolen from them as they’re forced to buy their outfits from Metro Design, only to have the cost taken out of their paycheck. These employees are trying to unionize, but Corvette is too focused on her mission to take them seriously. But before the Velvet Gang can manage to pull off their heist, someone else breaks into the store and cleans it out in a matter of minutes. They eventually discover that this thief is a Chinese worker from the factory that makes Metro Design clothes; she is using a teleportation device to suck up the clothes and send them back to China to damage Christie’s bottom line.

This is really where Boosters reaches its maximalist vision. The device Riley introduces is not simply a teleportation device, but a “dialectics cannon” capable of deconstructing any object back to its origins or “heightening the contradictions” of its existence to the point of absurdity. Really, what the device does is allow all of the people exploited by Metro Design to look each other in the eye and see each other as human beings. By collapsing space and time, a worker in China is able to connect with the workers in the store and realize their struggles are one and the same. The Chinese workers might be even more egregiously abused by Metro than their American counterparts; they are forced to work in grueling conditions that make them fatally ill, but they still are able to communicate and coordinate together in ways we are not able to in the real world.

The advantage capital has over workers is that the bosses have the resources to control production across complex global supply chains, while the rest of us as individuals have only our time and bodies to sell as our labor. By collapsing this distance between workers, Boots levels the playing field. One of the most interesting ideas in the film is that when the dialectics cannon deconstructs clothing back to the raw materials that made it, the workers whose bodies were injured making it see themselves miraculously recover. The labor that the workers engage in is what makes the clothes more than just raw materials; without them trading their bodies and time the clothes simply could not exist in the world. There is of course no way to turn back the clock for people who have their bodies mangled by work, but thinking about that damage and how we might create a society where people don’t work themselves to death is the first step to envisioning a better world.

This is what makes Riley’s use of magical realism essential to his storytelling. If he strictly told the story of shoplifters getting caught up in a broader labor dispute at the chain store they’re stealing from, it’d be a good movie, but you wouldn’t be able to consider the bigger context of where the clothes come from. Corvette is willing to abandon her personal ambitions of stealing enough clothes to get a big payday and stop boosting because she’s able to see the broader chain of abuse that Christie perpetuates. It is supremely difficult for us to see this in our regular life when we go to the store or sit at work. The pain and exploitation that went into the minerals to power my laptop is something I can know in the abstract, but I’ve never met a lithium miner myself. When we are bogged down in our private anxieties and financial distress, it becomes even more difficult to see the other people we’re connected to on the other side of the planet.

The other element that really elevates Boosters is the reveal that minor characters we’ve seen on the local news or selling memberships in a pyramid scheme are actually all skinless abominations who work for a think tank that Christie Smith founded. This think tank launders the ideology of capitalism, conveniently wearing the skin of whoever they need to in order to push their talking points most effectively. It’s very clearly an invocation of Carpenter’s They Live, and reminded me quite a bit of Slavoj Zizek’s classic interpretation of that film. In the movie, the protagonist finds a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the world as it really is, secretly controlled by aliens who are enslaving humanity through subliminal messaging in advertising, television programming, and the worship of money itself. This, of course, is a critique of the neoliberal consensus that was rapidly taking over society in the ‘80s, the sense that capitalism is the only system that is allowed to exist, that you should only see yourself as a passive consumer and not as a complex political subject; to question its domination is forbidden. But as Zizek explains: “Ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves, ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world, how we perceive its meaning … We in a way enjoy our ideology.” Corvette has to go through a very intense process of disillusionment; even as someone who steals from Christie Smith, she also idolizes her and her position at the top of fashion’s pyramid. It takes seeing the ways in which Christie steals from her workers, both in their pay and in their health, to fully break from the ideology that keeps Corvette trapped in a narrow struggle for her own survival. Her social relationships have to be transformed for the comforting illusion of ideology to be pulled from her eyes.

I want to close just by saying that Boosters is not stuffy or overly bogged down in Marxist theory. It is a joyful, wacky experience. The loving craft devoted to the film is apparent in every moment; the costumes obviously take center stage, but the music and comedic performances are also precisely attuned. Riley’s biggest influence might be Terry Gilliam, and this film is particularly stuffed to the gills with visual details that are very reminiscent of Brazil. It’s a film starring many of the finest actors of our era: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Lakeith Stanfield. It’s shockingly funny; the scene of a pussy-eating demon who sucks the soul out of his partners through their clitorises got one of the craziest responses I’ve heard from an audience in a minute. We get so few films like this, and just like Sorry to Bother You felt like a miracle eight years ago, I Love Boosters feels like a desperately needed revelation.