I Love Boosters
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Boots Riley
Written by	Boots Riley
Produced by	Aaron Ryder Andrew Swett Allison Rose Carter Jon Read
Starring	Keke Palmer Naomi Ackie Taylour Paige Poppy Liu Eiza González LaKeith Stanfield Will Poulter Don Cheadle Demi Moore
Cinematography	Natasha Braier
Edited by	Matthew Hannam Terel Gibson
Music by	Tune-Yards
Production companies	Ryder Picture Company Annapurna Pictures Savage Rose Films
Distributed by	Neon (United States and Canada) Focus Features Universal Pictures (International)
Release dates	March 12, 2026 (2026-03-12) (SXSW) May 22, 2026 (2026-05-22) (United States)
Running time	113 minutes[1]
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$20 million[2]
Box office	$5 million[3][4]

I Love Boosters is a 2026 American crime comedy film written and directed by Boots Riley, and starring Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, and Demi Moore.

The film premiered at the 2026 South by Southwest Film & TV Festival on March 12, 2026, and was released theatrically in the United States by Neon on May 22. It received positive reviews from critics.

In a surreal version of the San Francisco Bay Area, a group of “boosters” known as the "Velvet Gang"—Corvette, Mariah, and Sade—shoplift from a chain of Metro Designers fast fashion stores run by cutthroat maven Christie Smith. They sell the clothes they steal at one third of the retail price to make ends meet and pass savings along to the community.

Christie, who works out of a leaning tower in San Francisco, appears on television and livestreams herself on the internet, repeating her lofty vision of fashion as transformative art, and lambasting the Velvet Gang as "low class, urban bitches."

Corvette sneaks into Christie's office inside of a coffee cart and overhears Christie mention $100,000 suits. Unable to sneak out due to the slanted floor, she is spotted hy Christie; she provides a false name but shares her authentic admiration of Christie, and tells her that she designs clothes herself.

Corvette repeatedly encounters a mysterious man with a pinky ring, who seems to cast a spell on her when they lock eyes and pursues her romantically. Sade relates a story of a friend who hooked up with the man, who turned out to be a demon and sucked out her soul while performing oral sex on her.

The Velvet Gang get jobs at a Metro Designers store, planning a heist to steal all the inventory. Corvette sees that Christie has already stolen her designs. The other workers have become discontented with their low wages, poor working conditions, and exploitative practices.

Before the gang can enact the heist, their store is cleared out by someone else; surveillance footage shows a woman sucking all the merchandise into her bag. The gang track her down and capture her.

The woman, Jianhu, reveals that she has a device in the bag that can teleport anything that fits through its ring. She tells her story of working in a factory in China that makes clothes for Metro Designers, where her aunt died from inhaling particles while sandblasting jeans and her mother has developed cancer. She and her coworker have discovered that the facility has developed devices to teleport items in order to save on shipping costs. They steal the devices, and Jianhu is teleporting Metro Designers merchandise back to China to gain leverage in demanding better pay and working conditions for the factory workers.

The Velvet Gang and Jianhu team up against Christie. The gang's former coworker Violeta tries to convince them to help her organize Metro Designers retail workers, but they decline.

They discover that the teleporter devices have two other settings based on dialectical materialism: the "situational accelerator", which heightens the conflicts inherent in whatever it is pointed at, and a "deconstruction" setting, which takes apart whatever it is pointed at into the elements that made it. After deconstructing some Metro Designers clothes, Jianhu sees that a cut on her hand has healed, as the cost of her labor has been returned back to her body.

The Velvet Gang and Jianhu infiltrate a fashion show that Christie is throwing and use the devices to deconstruct the clothes both onstage and backstage. When they find a room where the $100,000 suits are, they point the devices at the people there, who are prominent talking heads on TV and a pyramid scheme promoter, and tell them to take off the suits. The people take their clothes off, but also remove their skin; Christie, a former math and science prodigy, has developed skin suits for them to wear for propaganda purposes.

The Velvet Gang flees the scene, escaping from both the police and the skinless people. Corvette and Sade have a conflict, as their motivations diverge around the money or the cause, and their bond has been strained. Corvette uses the device to move between China and the US, running from authorities in both settings, as Jianhu's accomplice is also being chased in China, and the factory employees are starting to stand up for Corvette and each other.

The Velvet Gang reunite back at the fashion show where Violeta has staged a small protest. They use the devices on the "situational accelerator" setting to amplify the protests at both the show and he factory into the protests into full-blown strikes.

A news report details gains that the workers have made from the strikes. On a video call from China, Jianhu shows how by deconstructing the clothes with the device, her mother's cancer has reversed as well. The man with the pinky ring admits to being a soul-sucking demon but asks Corvette to be with him anyway, saying that true love will turn him into a human; she declines to enter a relationship where she cannot receive oral sex. The Velvet Gang open a community center selling affordable clothes.

The film is written and directed by Boots Riley, and is based on the song "I Love Boosters!" by his group The Coup.^[2] Aaron Ryder and Andrew Swett are producing the film on behalf of Ryder Picture Company. Financing came from Neon and Waypoint Entertainment. In October 2024, the ensemble cast was reported to include Keke Palmer, Demi Moore, LaKeith Stanfield, Naomi Ackie, Eiza González, Poppy Liu, Taylour Paige and Will Poulter.^[5][6] Melissa Barrera was offered a role personally by Riley but had to decline owing to her scheduling conflicts; Barrera herself stated it was intended to be her comeback role after being blacklisted from the film industry.^[7] Principal photography began on November 7, 2024, in Atlanta,^[8] with Natasha Braier serving as the cinematographer.^[9]

The film score was composed and performed by Tune-Yards, released May 22, 2026. Riley and Palmer recorded an original soundtrack EP for the film as well, which was released May 8, 2026. The songs were written by Alina Kanin, Ben Boye, Mike Aaberg, Jesse Strauss, Lauren Palmer, Dominic Dalay, and Joel Robinow.^[10][11][12] The first single from the EP, "2-D", was released April 17, 2026. Both projects were released through Neon.

I Love Boosters had its world premiere as the opening film at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival on March 12, 2026. It is also the opening film on May 7 for the 2026 Seattle International Film Festival.^[13] Neon scheduled the United States release for May 22, 2026, with a simultaneous release in Canada.^[14][15] In November 2025, Riley revealed that, like his previous film Sorry to Bother You, international distribution of I Love Boosters would be handled by Focus Features and Universal Pictures.^[16]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 92% of 99 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.40/10. The website's consensus reads: "A raucous capitalist critique, I Love Boosters careens through the carefully-controlled chaos of writer-director Boots Riley's imagination to deliver a comedy that's as funny as it is thought-provoking."^[17] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 70 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.^[18] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.^[19]

• I Love Boosters at IMDb