I Love Boosters review – supercool outlaw women go shoplifting in Boots Riley’s frantic and funny caper

By Peter Bradshaw · The Guardian Culture

Demi Moore’s haute-couture maven attracts the attention of a gang of contemporary Robin Hood type clothes robbers in Riley’s fashion biz satire Here is an entertaining, if very exhausting fantasy-caper about the fashion biz from Boots Riley, a madcap mile-a-minute melee of unadulterated ker-aziness. You might need a couple of ibuprofen and a lie-down afterwards. Demi Moore perhaps thought she was here getting a gamey starring role, comparable to her Oscar-nominated turn in the beauty-industry satire The Substance . In fact, the way the film is structured and edited, Moore is hardly more than a returning cameo, though a potent one. She plays Christie Smith, a billionaire couture designer who has an office in a trendily designed city block which leans over at an experimental angle. Christie is the object of obsessive attention from “boosters”: supercool young outlaw women who, nettled by her arrogance, shoplift her clothes from upscale stores and sell them on at knockdown Robin Hood prices. They are Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), the latter having the superpower of, by holding her breath, turning herself into a white woman who is less likely to be challenged in a store; an interesting metaphor for what Frantz Fanon might have called black skin, white masks. Continue reading...