Release Date: May 22, 2026 (U.S. theatrical); March 12, 2026 (SXSW world premiere)
Runtime: 113 minutes (1 hr 53 min)
Rated: R — for strong sexual content, nudity, language throughout and brief drug use
Production Companies: Ryder Picture Company; Annapurna Pictures; Savage Rose Films
Producers: Aaron Ryder, Andrew Swett, Allison Rose Carter, Jon Read
Cinematography: Natasha Braier
Editing: Matthew Hannam & Terel Gibson
Music/Composer: Tune-Yards
I Love Boosters (2026)
Director & Writer: Boots Riley
Cast: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Lou, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, Demi Moore, Jason Ritter, Kara Young, Kerris Dorsey
Boots Riley has never once made it easy on the audience, and that’s exactly why he keeps winning. I Love Boosters opens like a heist film, spirals into surrealist body horror, detours through Marxist theory, and somehow lands on one of the most earnest and emotionally satisfying arguments for collective action you’re likely to see on a movie screen this year. The fact that it also happens to be hilarious — deliriously, unapologetically, live-action-Looney-Tunes hilarious — is less a bonus and more the whole point.
Keke Palmer leads as Corvette, an aspiring designer turned Bay Area booster who steals high-end fashion from Christie Smith’s luxury empire, Metro, and flips it back to the community at a fraction of the retail price — what she and her crew call, with full conviction, “fashion-forward philanthropy.” Palmer is completely at home here. She’s committed, genuinely funny when the material calls for it, and capable of pivoting on a dime to deliver a monologue that reorients the entire film. Alongside her are Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), always reliable in whatever world they’re dropped into, serving as Corvette’s conscience and counterweight — complacent when the situation allows, vocal when it demands.
Demi Moore, meanwhile, plays Christie Smith the way only someone completely unbothered by your comfort could. Cold, bold, and insulated from consequence by generational wealth and willful ignorance — she’s the embodiment of fashion capitalism given a face and a fashion house. Where Palmer invites you in, Moore keeps you at arm’s length, and that tension between them gives the film its backbone.
“Riley uses the surreal not as decoration but as argument — every absurd flourish is in service of a very real and very urgent point.”
What separates I Love Boosters from the usual well-intentioned social satire is that Riley refuses to let style and substance compete with each other. He insists they are the same thing. The Metro stores cycle through every color of the rainbow, creating set pieces that are as visually intoxicating as they are thematically loaded. Natasha Braier’s cinematography keeps things in a state of delightful vertigo — immersive, topsy-turvy, and appropriately off-axis for a film about a world that is also, fundamentally, off-axis. The Tune-Yards score is the engine underneath all of it, setting the silliness on track and keeping it from ever fully tipping into chaos.
The film’s moral and financial antagonists are set in motion on two fronts. Violeta (Eiza González) is a sharp retail employee and committed labor organizer who keeps getting sidelined by the Boosters in favor of their more personal mission — yet quietly, persistently, she keeps working. Jianhu (Poppy Liu) enters from halfway across the world, teleporting in directly from Christie’s Chinese garment factory with a stolen piece of technology and a very personal reason to want the whole operation torn down. Her mother developed cancer from the factory’s hazardous working conditions. She isn’t here for style points.
That technology — a three-mode device originally designed by Christie’s factory to teleport clothes from China to the U.S., bypassing taxes and shipping fees entirely — becomes the film’s most inspired invention:
Mode 1 — Teleporter: Ships objects instantaneously across distance, built to cut logistics costs and skirt import fees.
Mode 2 — Situational Accelerator: When aimed at an object or ongoing situation, it accelerates reality — heightening and fast-forwarding whatever is already in motion.
Mode 3 — Deconstruction: Dissolves any physical object back into its raw elemental components — undoing what capital has assembled.
The internal logic running the machine is dialectical materialism — the Marxist framework through which history progresses via conflict between opposing forces. Thesis (the bosses), antithesis (the underpaid workers), synthesis (a revolution). Riley embeds the philosophy directly into the hardware, and what sounds heady on paper lands with clarity and even joy on screen. Once the crew figures out how to properly wield each mode, the zaniness stops feeling indulgent and starts feeling inevitable — every absurdist set piece snapping into place as a chapter in a larger argument.
Corvette also contends with two recurring forces working to pull her off course. A giant metaphorical snowball of bills and past mistakes follows her throughout the film, growing larger the longer she delays confronting her circumstances. And then there is Pinky Ring Guy (LaKeith Stanfield), a Bay Area lothario whose infamous oral skills are, in this world, literal — he’s a soul-consuming demon who develops a genuine attachment to Corvette and offers her a way out that is really just a more elegant trap. She flirts with the distraction, gets pulled in by everything else happening around her, and ultimately turns away from both — and in doing so, watches the snowball shrink to the size of something she can hold in her palm.
That’s the film’s closing image and its thesis: not that the problems disappear, but that they become manageable when you stop trying to carry them alone.
There are moments where Riley’s surrealist instincts get slightly ahead of the story’s own throughline — where a sequence is so committed to its own energy that it briefly loses the thread of what it was trying to say. But these are minor turbulences in a film that is otherwise operating with real discipline beneath its apparent chaos. The freedom he takes with form is earned, because the emotional and political stakes underneath are always clear.
In a landscape increasingly numbed by sequels, franchises, and IP obligation, I Love Boosters is a reminder that cinema can still be a place where someone makes exactly the film they believe in, exactly the way they believe in it. Boots Riley has been doing this — in music, on television, and now twice on the big screen — with a consistency that looks less like luck and more like a worldview. The result is a film that is at once a fashion satire, a class war comedy, a sci-fi heist, and a love letter to working people who keep organizing even when nobody is watching. It is absolutely, unmistakably his — and right now, that’s one of the most exciting things a movie can be.