The whole idea of choosing to concentrate on One Thing I Like about a movie is to keep me from immediately launching into multi-thousand word essays trying to sum up everything a movie says more efficiently and effectively.1I still keep doing that for some reason, but those usually come the next day. It’s especially useful for I Love Boosters, since if I were to make a list of every brilliant detail or every moment that made me laugh out loud, we’d be here all day. Calling this movie “maximalist” is short-selling it.
It can also make it sound like I’m choosing my favorite thing about a movie, which is usually the case, but not always. It’d be impossible for me to pick one favorite thing about a movie this clever, fun, constantly surprising, and genuinely positive and inspiring. But there was one segment in particular that stood out to me for packing a ton into a couple of minutes.
Demi Moore plays Christie Smith, a billionaire fashion designer whose outlet stores are targeted by Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie), and Mariah (Taylour Paige), who steal high-end clothes from designer stores and sell them at a huge discount to people in Oakland who can’t afford them. Mariah’s trying to get the branding “Fashion Forward Philanthropy” to stick. As they learn more about how the business is actually run — and Smith starts to make connections about who these boosters actually are — it transforms into a bitter and personal rivalry between Corvette and Smith.
The segment that stood out to me was part of a documentary2Which was narrated by Viggo Mortensen, who never appears on-screen about Christie Smith and her rise to success. She’s described as a child prodigy, who worked under an older and more prominent male scientist until he took credit for her discoveries. She dropped out of MIT and went into fashion as a pure expression of how to change the world.
While the narration is going on, we see still photos of Christie from childhood into adulthood, and of course, they’re all photos of Demi Moore at similar points throughout her life. Especially around the St Elmo’s Fire years, when she was being photographed a lot. Initially, I just thought of it as being like the CGI de-aged version of Robert Downey, Jr. from Captain America: Civil War, or the younger Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The advantage of having actors who were super-famous when they were younger is that there’s a ton of footage and photos available.
But here, I thought it was a lot more nuanced. Demi Moore’s not the star of I Love Boosters; the story focuses on Keke Palmer and Naomi Ackie’s characters in particular, and good luck to anyone trying to steal focus from Keke Palmer, even if she weren’t the main protagonist. But Moore doesn’t take the Glenn Close route, either, by delighting in being a scenery-chewing villain who steals every scene she’s in. (They’ve got Will Poulter and LaKeith Stanfield for that, anyway). In the hyperactive and everything-turned-up-to-maximum world of I Love Boosters, Moore’s performance is pretty grounded, actually.
While she’s having fun with it, the inclusion of those photos also makes it feel like she’s fully committed herself to the project. Even almost as much as she did to The Substance. It seems like this is something she believes in, not just as an over-the-top acting opportunity — this role could easily have been Cruella deVil, and the movie still would’ve worked — but as an opportunity to bring in her own experience. A young woman who was a fully-realized person, and who had to make her own way through people who’d try to take advantage of her, or reduce her into a shallower, simpler version.3I don’t know anything about Moore’s real-life experience, but as she was a beautiful woman in Hollywood who got extremely famous at a young age, and in the 1980s no less, it sure seems like there weren’t many different ways that could’ve possibly played out.
Christie Smith spends most of her time in a ludicrously tilted building4It was never quite clear whether it was one of her homes and doubled as an office, or just an office in San Francisco, that my husband pointed out was likely a reference to the Millennium Tower, which is sinking and also tilting (although not nearly as much). It’s yet another bizarre, very funny image in a movie that’s full of them, and I Love Boosters takes full advantage of all of the slapstick potential. But Smith and the people who work for her almost never even acknowledge it — there’s exactly one moment where Smith intervenes to keep a coffee cart from rolling away, acting as if it should’ve been completely obvious to anyone how to handle the problem.
The documentary and the tilting building worked together to add another dimension to her character — if not really sympathy, then at least complexity. She’s not the posturing dimwit we’ve grown to associate with villainous billionaires; she’s likely a real genius. And her public statements are absolutely intended to manipulate, but there is something she still genuinely believes in at her core. I Love Boosters is absolutely not a “everybody has good in them” movie; there are most definitely villains. And Christie Smith is one of them. But there’s a hint of tragedy to it. A sense that she had so much potential, but over the years became less and less aware of just how tilted her world-view had become.
It was a really interesting detail in a movie that seems to be the direct antithesis of “subtle.” There seems to be so much fighting for attention, and the movie gets so direct, especially in its third act, that it can be easy to miss how much of it is about balance and restraint. Although Keke Palmer’s character is the focus of a sensory-overload of a movie, she’s not doing the same thing she did in Nope, for instance. (Or her amazing time hosting Saturday Night Live). She knows exactly what is the focus of each scene — in a lot of them, it’s the dazzling clothes — and doesn’t have to bring the full weight of her impossible charisma to everything. Some of the time, it feels like a movie has to have this much stuff in it just to reach the level she operates at by default.
And everyone in the movie is bringing everything they’ve got, with the sense that everyone in the movie knows exactly what movie they’re in. Especially remarkable when this feels like a movie that would be impossible to understand before it was finished.
I spent most of the movie not believing it was Naomi Ackie, because I know she’s British, and yet here it seemed like they’d cast a lookalike who spoke not just in an American accent, but an Oakland one. Don Cheadle is so completely subsumed by his character that I wouldn’t even have known to look for him if I hadn’t been warned.
And LaKeith Stanfield plays a “pinkie ring guy” who’s almost always shot in close-up, the world around him warping and vibrating as Corvette is pulled into the allure of his sensitive, soulful eyes. He’s one half of a scene (with his real-life wife Kasmere Trice Stanfield) that in any other movie, would be The One Scene That Everybody’s Talking About. Here, it felt more like the movie announcing “…and we’re off!”
I’m still not exactly sure why the character’s in the movie, besides the fact that it’s funny as hell and never stops being funny, and that Stanfield is good friends with Boots Riley. And there doesn’t really need to be a reason. But I did get the sense that it was yet another part of the overwhelming katamari of stresses and anxieties that Corvette has to deal with. While you’re just trying to survive, much less do something meaningful with your life, you’ve got these smooth men who’ll charm you and then drain the life out of you.
And calling it a “katamari” wasn’t just me being clever; it’s really in the movie. I Love Boosters is packed full of stuff that it just assumes the audience can keep up with, without its having to stop and point out how clever it is, or slow things down to let everybody in the audience catch up. My particular favorite: the devices in the movie that are color-coded orange and blue, like in Portal.
Much like Sorry to Bother You, I Love Boosters is hilariously funny while still having a heartfelt message about the power of collective action. And it doesn’t try to hide its message to give it more weight; it introduces almost literal plot devices, along with a lengthy description not only of how they work, but what they mean.
If you hear the premise and are tempted to imagine that you know exactly what this movie is, I can assure you that you don’t. It is a movie about capitalism, the “extraction class,” the value of labor, and the human cost of consumer products, all centered around the entirety of the fashion industry. But I never once felt it was too preachy, or even too on-the-nose, even as it was saying and showing exactly what the message was. There’s such a feeling of earnestness and fun. Everyone gives the sense that they believe strongly in what they’re making, and that they had fun making it. As a result, it feels inspirational.
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