The Cast of <em>I Love Boosters</em> Is Stacked

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Boots Riley is back, and he's pointed his camera directly at the fashion industry. The director behind the surrealist telemarketing nightmare Sorry to Bother You (2018) returns this May with I Love Boosters, a hallucinatory, color-saturated takedown of luxury fashion and the economic machinery behind it. According to Harper's Bazaar, the film arrives May 22 — and its cast alone is worth the price of admission.

At the center of it all is Keke Palmer as Corvette, the ringleader of the Velvet Gang — a trio of professional shoplifters who boost high-end fashion and redistribute it to working-class buyers at a steep discount. Think Robin Hood with better taste in clothes and a squat in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant. Palmer, who has been quietly building one of the most compelling careers in Hollywood through Nope and One of Them Days, is Riley's ideal collaborator: her magnetism is loud enough to anchor even his most feverish instincts. Rounding out the Gang are Naomie Ackie as Sade, the cool-headed strategist of the operation, and Taylour Paige as Mariah, who reportedly gets less screen time than she deserves but squeezes every drop of comedic gold out of her scenes regardless.

The Villains and the Wildcard Additions

Opposite them stands Demi Moore as Christie Smith — a platinum-blonde, MIT-educated fashion genius who allegedly ran Chanel at 15 and has somehow only grown more unhinged since. Fresh off her Oscar-nominated turn in The Substance, Moore is clearly in the middle of a sharp, deliberate reinvention, and playing a bug-eyed mogul who screams insults at shoplifters on national television is a choice that commands respect. Will Poulter plays her faux-hawked middle manager Grayson, a man who times employee breaks in seconds, and Don Cheadle shows up essentially unrecognizable as the leader of an anti-loneliness pyramid scheme — a welcome departure from his decade in the MCU.

The film's larger ensemble does the heavy lifting on its political subtext. Poppy Liu (Hacks) plays Jianou, an exploited Chinese factory worker who joins the Velvet Gang after a theft so fast it borders on supernatural — she becomes the crew's unexpected wild card and introduces a global dimension to the film's labor politics. Eiza González's Violeta, a Metro Design cashier moonlighting as an actual union organizer, is the only character who seems to understand that stealing clothes is a vibe, but collective action is a strategy. And LaKeith Stanfield reappears in Riley's universe as the "Pinky Ring Guy" — a perpetually overdressed, faintly ominous seducer who reads like a private joke between director and muse.

Riley's sophomore effort is reportedly messier and more ambitious than his first — a nonlinear fever dream stuffed with dream sequences, sci-fi detours, and enough social commentary to fill a semester syllabus — but with a cast this stacked and a premise this sharp, I Love Boosters looks like exactly the kind of chaotic, intelligent cinema the fashion world has accidentally earned.

When the industry has spent decades aestheticizing its own excess, it was only a matter of time before someone made it look this good while burning it down.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.