Boots Riley made Sorry to Bother You in 2018 and then went quiet. Seven years of silence from one of the most original voices in American cinema. Now he is back with I Love Boosters, and critics are very much in. The film opened on May 22 carrying a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the kind of number that tells you Riley did not lose a step during the hiatus.
Keke Palmer plays a shoplifter who leads a crew that steals designer clothes and redistributes them to the community at a fraction of the cost. It is a Robin Hood story filtered through Riley's very specific political lens, the same one that gave us telemarketing white voice and horse people in his debut. The premise sounds like it could be a comedy, and from what I have read, it is funny. But Riley has never been interested in just being funny. He wants to make you laugh and then make you uncomfortable about why you were laughing.
The film grew out of a song Riley wrote for The Coup nearly 20 years ago. That detail tells you something important about how his mind works. He has been sitting with this idea for two decades, turning it over, waiting for the right moment and the right medium to tell it. That kind of patience usually produces something with real depth, and by all accounts, it has.
The ensemble is stacked in a way that feels almost unfair. Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, LaKeith Stanfield, Don Cheadle, Demi Moore. That is a murderers' row of talent. But critics are pointing to Palmer as the anchor, the performance that holds the whole thing together. Palmer has been building toward a role like this for years. Nope showed she could carry a blockbuster. This apparently shows she can carry something with more teeth.
Riley occupies a lane in American filmmaking that basically no one else is in. He makes political art that is also wildly entertaining, confrontational without being preachy, surreal without being inaccessible. Sorry to Bother You was one of the most original debuts of the last decade, and the fact that he took seven years to follow it up suggests he was not interested in making something that felt like a lesser version of what came before.
If you loved Sorry to Bother You, the wait is over. Go see this. If you have not seen it, watch it this week before I Love Boosters. You will understand the kind of filmmaker you are dealing with, and you will be ready for whatever Riley has planned next.
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