Boots Riley fashions a wicked satire in 'I Love Boosters'

Keke Palmer leads a team of thieves in riotous anti-capitalism caper movie

Turns out you can fight late-stage capitalism AND look good doing it. (NEON)

“I Love Boosters” opens with Keke Palmer on the prowl in a San Francisco nightclub. She sizes up a man, seduces him, and brings him back to her nearby apartment.

Or, not an apartment exactly. But a pop-up store full of clothing she and her cohorts have smuggled out of high-fashion clothing stores in the city. He takes umbrage, and is offended that he’s been duped. But also – hey, you can’t bet these prices!

So begins “I Love Boosters,” writer-director Boots Riley’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2018 capitalist satire “Sorry To Bother You.” Hopping up and down the food chain of the fashion world, “Boosters” is just as inventive and funny as his last film, but a good deal more hopeful that the workers can unite and get the boot of corporate power off their necks. Even if that boot belongs to a $1,900 pair of Christian Louboutins.

Palmer plays Corvette, a wannabe fashion designer who lives surreptitiously in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant. It’s a wryly trenchant metaphor for Corvette’s existence – she can still smell the chicken, like she can smell the good life. But she can’t taste it. Her stress dreams of a giant, rolling ball of bills and paperwork chasing her down the street are highly relatable.

Corvette and her cohorts, nicknamed “The Velvet Gang,” steal high-end clothes, sometimes stuffing so many items under their jumpsuits that they waddle out of the store looking like the Michelin Man. Her confederates include Sade (Naomi Ackie), who falls prey to a MLM scheme run by a smiling guru (a hilarious Don Cheadle under heavy prosthetics) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), who can transform into a white woman if she holds her breath, thereby distracting the store clerks.

A favorite target is a store called Metro, a chi-chi store in which every item of clothing is the exact same color. Metro is the brainchild of eccentric designer Christie Smith (a wonderfully funny Demi Moore), who lives her life like it’s one extended TED Talk, pontificating about how “humanity is our canvas” and “our thoughts and memories are records of light.” In one of the film’s many gonzo visual flourishes, Christie lives in a penthouse apartment built on a steep angle – she literally can’t help but “lean in.”

Under all that makeup, that’s Don Cheadle as a MLM guru. (NEON)

Corvette resents Christy and the stranglehold she has on American culture, even as she wants to be her. After discovering Christie has stolen one of her designs, Corvette is out for revenge. But the film’s heist plot is just the thinnest clothesline for Riley to hang his wackiest ideas – at some point, teleportation devices enter the picture, as well as “Sorry to Bother You” star LaKeith Stanfield as a French lothario with a Lovecraftian secret, and a Greek chorus of “sensible centrist” TV talking heads who aren’t what they appear to be.

Packed with ideas, gags, colors and noise, “I Love Boosters” is as overstuffed as Corvette’s felonious jumpsuit, and the combined assault can be a little overwhelming, especially in the dragged-out climax. (Is there any notion Riley DIDN’T put in his movie?) But all of them have a purpose, tearing away the shiny fabric of late-stage capitalism to reveal the exploitation and dehumanization beneath it.

Unlike the grim twist ending of “Sorry To Bother You,” “I Love Boosters” ends on an optimistic note, urging workers of the world to unite and find power together. I don’t know if I’m as hopeful as Riley suggests about this happening. But solidarity sure does look good on us.

“I Love Boosters” opens Friday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at Marcus Point, Marcus Palace and AMC Fitchburg 18.