On Watching: I Love Boosters

On style, solidarity, and fighting for the foundations of life

I Love Boosters by Boots Riley is an extremely creative, stylish, and funny movie about fashion, theft, and aspiration. It’s filled with a charismatic cast that draws you in, and it would be easy to get lost in the colorful set pieces, the surreal twists, or the frenetic pace. That pace and approach match the themes of the movie. Style matters, but foundation matters more. That’s what stuck with me as I watched: the mechanics, the style, the creativity, all of it bursting at the seams and coming together in service of the message. It can be overwhelming and arguably overstuffed, but life is overwhelming when you’re struggling to survive.

Corporate powers continue to make life more untenable, pushing forward the symbols of a better life while making the foundations of one less accessible. To make that point, Boots Riley, for the most part, throws subtext to the wind and hammers home that a better life is possible if collective action makes capital bend. Chasing the symbols keeps you on the hamster wheel, always running but never moving forward. You can’t elevate, and you can’t sustain real aspiration, if you are trapped in survival.

Observation 1: The film distinguishes between symbols of a better life and the foundations of one

The film distinguishes between the symbols of a better life and the foundations of one throughout. The fact that the movie is built around fashion is key. The women in the film admire the talent of the billionaire designer whose stores they boost. They aspire to be in her world. They recognize that the impact is real. That cuts against the common tendency to talk about fashion and designer clothes as superficial luxuries or status symbols with minimal real value. Fashion often points toward the aspirations and symbols we chase — proximity to status, access, the world of the rich and famous — but here it also points toward an eroding base.

Style is real. It’s a form of expression, it can be a point of connection, and it can build confidence. Deion Sanders famously connects confidence to success: “If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you play good. If you play good, they pay good. If they pay good, you live good.”

That’s what the women in the film are chasing. Not just the symbols themselves, but the ability to feel good, get paid good, and eventually live good. But it’s never that simple. The film examines the material conditions between looking good, feeling good, getting paid good, and eventually living good.

Observation 2: Style matters, but it cannot do the work of foundation

In an interview, Boots Riley spoke about how boosters were a pillar of the hood. When he was a rapper, they kept him looking good when he couldn’t afford store prices, which was essential to his career. The movie shows a mother saying that without the boosters she couldn’t afford a back-to-school wardrobe for her kids. Style signals belonging, especially in school, work, and all of our social systems. The right outfit not only allows you to self-express, it can provide social legibility, or even safety, if it signals you belong.

Still, for as important as fashion and style are for expressing life, they can’t hold together that life. I love luxury, but it’s not everything. When the foundation is unstable, luxury doesn’t enter my mind. My mind flips to fixing the foundation, whether that means reducing debt and making sure the bills are paid, finding connection so I feel less isolated, or being valued for my work and paid properly. I often joke with friends that we’ve hit the point where corporations have sucked the joy out of consumerism. Rather than a dopamine hit, you get the dread of having spent too much money. At that point the symbols start to lose their grip. And that’s only on the consumer end.

The movie makes a point of going beyond the consumption and looking at the labor too, from the sales floor to the production line that forms the foundation beneath the symbols. As the symbols extract more and feed it to the top, the foundation becomes unstable. We see a luxury high-rise where the rich and famous live, literally built on a slope. The sales staff and factory workers who bring the symbols to life, who make the luxury happen, see little or even negative return and are driven to revolt.

The problem is not loving beautiful things. The problem is asking them to hold together a life that lacks stability beneath them. Once style gets asked to do impossible work, the self becomes unstable too.

Observation 3: Unstable foundations produce unstable selves

As the cracks become apparent and consumption, performance, and fantasy prove unable to deliver the life they promise, the unstable foundation produces an unstable self. And how could you ever really keep up if the foundation of life was built on consumption, performance, and fantasy? Trends change rapidly, the fantasy escalates, we become more isolated, and performance requires an audience you constantly want to grow.

We see in the film a pyramid scheme that monetizes community, turning connection duplicitous and transactional. We see a demon that entrances and lures people, giving them momentary pleasure at the cost of their soul. We see a best friend relationship develop a rift because instability makes it harder to fully see and value the connections already in your life. The symbols, instead of solving any of that, only perpetuate it further. And to deliver those symbols to us, the health, dignity, and time of workers get stripped away.

That is why the film’s real turn is not toward better aspiration, but toward solidarity.

Observation 4: Solidarity and changed conditions make aspiration real

It’s not proximity to luxury or elite symbols that makes aspiration real or gives people the power to enact the changes they seek. It’s solidarity that changes conditions. The connection they form with Jianhu, the Chinese factory worker who helps them with the heists, and with the larger factory worker group, is nearly instant because of shared conditions and overlapping goals. It creates a sense of community that is not duplicitous. And through that organizing, the possibility of changing what kind of life is available becomes real.

That’s the politics of it all. Capitalism creates isolation, causes us to miss the connections around us, makes us susceptible to unfulfilling and transactional relationships, and forces us to sacrifice our health, dignity, and time for exploitative pay. Solidarity, labor organizing, and collective action create the conditions for change.

The film’s color, energy, and aliveness mirror its politics. Its lack of CGI, its use of VFX and practical effects, its clear audio levels, and its bright colors make it feel handmade, vivid, and embodied. Boots Riley talks about developing specialty camera lenses for particular shots, really honoring the craft. That honor allows the form to resist the deadened, flattened cinematic worlds we see so often in modern film, where sound and lighting are treated like things to fix later in post, because the people who do that labor are pushed aside, and color palettes track toward neutrals and darks in the name of “realism.” That resistance makes the film feel alive, which is exactly what it is arguing for: aliveness, and fighting for the foundations of life.

I found that particularly inspiring. I’ve always admired and appreciated creativity, but as I write more, I find myself especially inspired when I encounter something uniquely creative, ambitious, or well executed, especially when it doesn’t compromise its message or vision. This movie in particular is timely as I think and write more about connection, creation, struggle, and elevation in my own life. It shines a light on how politics, contradiction, pleasure, craft, and entertainment can coexist, rather than parts being sacrificed just to make the art a more consumable product that’s easier to convert into ROI.

Conclusion

The film doesn’t separate politics from pleasure, or meaning from style. It understands that the struggle for a better life has to include aliveness, beauty, connection, and creation too. Luxury can enrich life, but it cannot be the foundation of one. Connection with your community, with your work, with what you produce, and with who you are, that is closer to the foundation of a better life, because it takes collective action and real demands to change the material conditions. That’s because you can’t sustain real aspiration while trapped in survival, and you can’t elevate without a foundation in place.