Critic Reviews

Buffeted by both an incredible cast and crew, I Love Boosters is an unexpected celebration of friendship, community, and solidarity.

For such heavy political themes and rallying cries to action, Riley makes it wildly entertaining, with eye-popping visuals, and a circus-inspired score by Tune-Yards. What’s most important is that among all the mishaps and misadventures, his message never loses its clarity: Liberation is for everyone, and, most importantly, it should be fun.

Funny, occasionally raunchy and dressed in a deliciously rainbow-bright array of costumes, Boots Riley’s fizzy caper “I Love Boosters” is just the thing for summer.

I find it hard to wish Riley would rein himself in when the excess is so much a part of the film’s joy.

Riley, proving himself to be a romantic just as he is a believer in revolution, clearly not only loves these boosters with hearts of gold, but anyone that is trying to make it all work for themselves and those around them.

Boots Riley is a genuine original, and in I Love Boosters, he makes a statement as wildly entertaining as possible.

Though its many narrative twists and amusing turns might wear down less adventurous viewers, this film will be embraced by those who enjoyed the director’s dystopian critique Sorry to Bother You and his equally scathing series I’m a Virgo.

I Love Boosters is full of major swings and plenty of individual concepts that could take up an entire film, yet Riley balances everything this movie is trying to do quite well.

“Boosters” isn’t perfect and that doesn’t matter. The audacity of it — the exuberance Riley puts into making and loving movies — is what I want to see more of from every filmmaker, fashionista and human being still grinding at their own creative ambitions.

I Love Boosters, Boots Riley’s candy-colored indictment of capitalism, is as sharp as it is deranged. Living somewhere along the spectrum of magical realism, the entire film is a brilliant balancing act of comedy and call-to-action that sprinkles a little philosophy in-between.