Boots Riley’s zany love letter to theft

A few months back, I made the mistake of trying to buy a product from Target, a store where products are sold — allegedly. It was barely noon, but I’d already flown halfway across the country on an early flight to visit my parents for the holidays, and spent two hours in a rental car driving from the airport. Exhaustion was setting in, but the deodorant I’d packed needed to be replaced, so I found myself roaming the body care aisles, wincing under the fluorescent lights as my patience rapidly grew thinner.

It was unusually difficult to locate my brand, which I eventually realized was because it was hiding inside a plastic lock box, just in case a band of perfume-pilfering deodorant delinquents happened to breeze through town. Accessorizing the lock box was a button with bold white lettering screaming at me to “PUSH FOR ASSISTANCE.” I did as told,and was met with a robotic voice echoing the button’s sentiment every five seconds. Help was on the way, God’s voice assured me. It was not.

My assistance never came, and the deodorant was never purchased. It stayed inside the lock box and my business went elsewhere. Loitering in the body care aisle of a big box store, hoping someone will arrive to quell the robot’s tone so you can move through the world odor-free, is a uniquely modern humiliation ritual. Making a “CVS run” for toiletries has turned into a “CVS crawl.” It’s virtually impossible to be in and out of a store in five minutes.

Everything — even the things you’d never imagine that anyone would care to steal — is locked away, awaiting a presumably human store employee to free it with their magic key and true love’s kiss. But that process moves at a snail’s pace, if it happens at all. Store employees don’t get paid enough to hustle and, frankly, I don’t want them to. The average sales associate at CVS makes minimum wage, has paltry benefits (if any), and is now being arsed with playing ye olde shoppekeep for toothpaste and socks, just so someone who needs these things but might not have the means to pay for them won’t steal them. We live in an absurd reality.

How fortunate we are that chronicling and exploding our absurd reality is writer-director Boots Riley’s whole thing. Co-founder of the politically outspoken hip-hop group The Coup, Riley has devoted his career to being a thorn in the side of the elite, combining bold visual aesthetics with the candid, people-first messaging West Coast hip-hop is renowned for.

In his work behind the camera thus far, Riley has taken aim at late-stage capitalism and Black American disaffection with graceful aplomb, becoming one of the defining voices in contemporary film with just one feature, the 2018 “Sorry to Bother You,” under his belt.

With his latest film, “I Love Boosters,” Riley has set his stylish sights on the manufactured theft crisis, turning this strange and often annoying microcosm of our contemporary lives inside-out to expose its many unseemly ramifications. Here, he assembles his own elite squad known as the Velvet Gang: Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylour Paige) and Sade (Naomi Ackie), a bewigged team of shoplifters, or “boosters,” who hit popular Metro Designers retail outlets in the Bay Area and resell whatever they can grab. The Velvet Gang practices FFF: Fashion-Forward Filanthropy — an intentional spelling mistake, or “branding,” as Mariah calls it. This credo is their way of giving back while making a profit, and it doesn’t hurt that it also works the Metro Designers’ tyrannical founder, Christie Smith (Demi Moore), into a lather, either.

When the Velvet Gang gets word that Christie is launching a line of $100,000 suits, the trio hatches a plan to get their hands on the merchandise before anyone else can, stumbling into a horrifying and hysterical conspiracy in the process. What follows is a sometimes frustrating, often hilarious hodgepodge of observations about the innate folly of living in a world where treating employees with basic respect is seen as optional.

In a time of growing economic disparity, when the chasm between the working class and the one percent is so enormous that it has virtually destroyed upward mobility, “I Love Boosters” rips into the establishment with biting satirical flair. What begins as a story of uber-fashionable outlaws transforms into a rallying cry for the rightfully weary employee, measuring the steep cost of cheap labor to make a compelling case for tucking that eyeshadow palette or pack of batteries right into your pocket.

Yes, “I Love Boosters” is proudly pro-theft. And what’s so wrong about that, really? The benevolent shoplifter knows as well as any store manager and corporate CEO that loss margins are baked into the budget. Excluding mom-and-pop shops and small businesses, essentially every store expects to lose a certain amount of money in merchandise each fiscal year. That’s just how the retail business operates, which is precisely why seeing so many items locked away behind a theft-protection system reminiscent of an M.C. Escher illustration feels so outrageous.

What’s the point in shopping at a store if you can’t actually, you know, shop there? These unnecessary preventative measures aren’t just a nuisance for the consumer; they’re a hassle for the overworked, underpaid employee who spends their shift telling customers, “No, we don’t have more of that in the back.” The stores are no longer stores. They’ve become monuments to corporate greed — zones of atrophy, boredom and total disempowerment.

But the way Riley’s screenplay portrays the average shoplifter may help the film skirt the inevitable pearl-clutching and finger-wagging. Corvette, a promising and hard-working designer herself who aspires to Christie’s brilliance, is tormented by nightmares of rich people complaining about the generation who “can’t expect everything to be handed to them.” She imagines a massive ball of bills and paper forms rolling around Oakland, following her every move. Like many young people today, she was born into a world that isn’t fit to accommodate her, no matter how hard she works.

So, why not take something for herself? The wealthy — the figures who control the world, the Bezoses and Musks and Sarandoses — have no problem stealing. They take our data, our time and our attention, and then turn around and monetize it, selling it for profit to ensure that we continue to fund their wives’ frivolous trips into space. “I should have it all: colors, patterns, beauty,” Corvette tells Grayson (Will Poulter), the manager of a Metro Designers outlet, during a job interview. “It’s mine anyway.”

Her words bear a wonderful complexity thanks to Palmer, who’s perfectly cast in her lead role. She delivers this line with both humor and a remarkably unassuming depth, a weight that suggests her character has far more on her mind than just shoplifting. “Mine,” in this sense, doesn’t simply allude to something Corvette will steal; she’s referring to all the invisible things that comprise a mass-produced product — the labor and energy and time. She’s speaking collectively as a member of the working class, expressing solidarity with those whose lives are devoted to work, all in pursuit of being able to live with a modicum of comfort, and maybe, one day, to buy something beautiful they’ve long coveted.

Her sentiment takes on a much more literal meaning when Corvette finds out that Christie ripped off one of her designs for Metro Designers’ latest collection. Suddenly, “I Love Boosters” widens its scope to comment on white people’s proclivity for erasing Black artistry and co-opting it as their own, before tightening its aperture once more to refine its messaging about labor, all at a frenetic pace. At times, it’s a discombobulating experience, and the film would surely benefit from giving its ideas more space to breathe.

But Riley’s brain works overtime, and when his concepts work, they feel as radical as any protest film. He posits that all the various forms of our modern alienation are connected, drawing throughlines that are both preposterous and incisive as he shows his work. A B-plot about strange local news clips — with inspired cameos from Jason Ritter and Kara Young, whose chiron “Crying Black Mother Demands More Police” implies that there’s an insidious larger scheme afoot — plays like a running joke until it ties the whole film together.

But “I Love Boosters” is not a conspiracy-minded movie. Rather, it’s a pragmatic game of connecting the dots, revealing a damning picture of widespread corruption. If you miss a step or skip ahead, the final result might look a little off, but even what’s visible of the intended design is a testament to Riley’s dexterity. Even in the film’s most convoluted moments, there’s a fire of dissent percolating just beneath its surface.

In the final act, which culminates in Christie’s hotly anticipated fall runway show, Riley successfully closes the circle. The set piece is a daring, madcap, Wes Anderson-esque romp through San Francisco all the way to the Metro Designers factory in China, where worker conditions are grim and hazardous. It’s not a far cry from the real-life environment in fast fashion factories. Yet horrific reports about 18-hour workdays and a piecework pay scale of pennies per item haven’t deterred consumers from buying up the synthetic crap Shein and the drop-shippers peddle. It’s a cycle: Consumers want to save money because they don’t earn enough in the first place, and that demand drives terrible working conditions for the people who make the clothes. The only people benefiting from this endless loop are the Christie Smiths of the world, who will do whatever it takes to maintain their comfort and control.

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Here, Corvette and the Velvet Gang realize that this is about much more than shoplifting some clothes and reselling them at a discount. Their operation stands to make a real change. Theft can be a tool to communicate a large-scale message — or, at the very least, try to communicate one. Everything quickly comes into perspective. Why would Metro Designers respond to an uptick in theft by spending the money to turn their stores into armored safes with round-the-clock guards, when their employees get 30 seconds for lunch and can’t afford the store’s products on their own wages? Why lock up deodorant when a company could use that cash to pay their employees enough to stop living paycheck-to-paycheck? Isn’t it funny how the money to implement theft protection is no problem, while workers see no changes to their paycheck?

“I Love Boosters” argues that theft can be an efficient mechanism for exposing the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. It’s a tool to clarify where the money comes from and where it’s going. If stealing creates a forced transparency, putting more power in the hands of the worker, then good: That’s precisely where it should be. Boosting isn’t a solution, but it is an equalizer, reminding upper management that a different title and fatter salary don’t exempt them from compassion, inside or outside the store.