First Reels | I Love Boosters

by TheFilmGordon Staff

Capitalism as performance art, chaos as community

Another outrageous creative detonation from Boots Riley, I Love Boosters doesn’t arrive quietly. It crashes in, rearranges the furniture, and asks why the room existed this way in the first place.

The First Impression

The trailer feels less like a preview and more like a manifesto scribbled in neon ink. Bodies move with intention, dialogue lands sideways, and the energy suggests a world operating on rules we recognize but refuse to admit we live by. This isn’t absurdity for laughs. It’s absurdity as exposure.

The Read

• The film frames capitalism not as a system but as a group activity, one that demands participation even from those it exploits.
• Reality bends casually, as if surrealism is the only honest language left.
• Humor is weaponized, not softened. Jokes don’t cushion the blow, they sharpen it.
• Community emerges not from harmony, but from shared disruption.

The Risk

Riley once again refuses accessibility as a goal. The gamble isn’t whether audiences will “get it,” but whether they’ll accept being implicated. The trailer suggests a film unconcerned with comfort, uninterested in moral hand-holding, and fully committed to confrontation wrapped in laughter.

The Question It Leaves Behind

If the system is ridiculous, what does it mean that we keep playing along?

The Ensemble

(Because Boots Riley never casts randomly.)

Written and directed by Boots Riley (writer/director, and unmistakable voice of the film’s worldview), I Love Boosters assembles a cast that reads like a deliberate collision of tone, persona, and cultural meaning. This is not a lineup built for balance. It’s built for friction.

Cast includes:

• Keke Palmer, weaponizing charisma and intelligence as both shield and provocation
• Naomi Ackie, bringing emotional precision to a world designed to destabilize it
• Taylour Paige, embodying urgency and physical presence as a form of resistance
• Poppy Liu, channeling sharp comedic tension straight into the film’s moral fault lines
• Eiza González, whose controlled intensity suggests performance as currency
• Lakeith Stanfield, continuing Riley’s fascination with characters who exist one step out of phase with reality
• Will Poulter, unsettling in his ability to toggle between sincerity and menace
• Don Cheadle, grounding the chaos with authority shaped by history and consequence
• Demi Moore, adding legacy weight to a film preoccupied with systems that outlive their usefulness