Boots Riley, the musician and film-maker behind Sorry to Bother You and I’m a Virgo, has a new film, I Love Boosters, which turns shoplifting into a Robin Hood-style proletarian allegory. The film arrives amid renewed debate over retail theft, with some on the left framing small-scale “boosting” as a form of resistance, while labour advocates warn it ultimately harms workers.
Riley, who identifies as a communist rather than simply anti-capitalist, argues that theft is intrinsic to capitalism. “Theft is not outside of capitalism; it’s what capitalism was built on – and not even, like, metaphorically,” he says. “The bourgeoisie was no different in that they stole land, stole minerals, stole labor. But that theft is thought of as legal.”
In I Love Boosters, Keke Palmer plays Corvette, a design aspirant crushed by debt who leads an all-female shoplifting crew in San Francisco, funnelling goods back to her working-class Oakland community. Demi Moore plays Christie Smith, a haute couturier who treats fashion as population control and declares war on the “low-class, urban bitches” of the Velvet Gang. The film also features a Chinese factory worker who teleports into the story, tying street-level class struggle to labour unrest overseas.
Riley dismisses the idea that retailers need to raise prices because of shoplifting. “We found a clear example of that here with [Walgreens] in the Bay Area saying shoplifting was causing them to close and restructure – and then a recording of [executives] telling shareholders that, really, shoplifting had nothing to do with it,” he says.
The director, 55, speaks in full paragraphs and delivers his ideas with an unguarded, academic style. His cast took an unconventional promotional route, including a stop at a Los Angeles gas station where Palmer and LaKeith Stanfield gave away free fill-ups as a live rooster looked on. “The roosters are out,” Riley says, noting that Oakland recently banned roosters while allowing chickens.
