An anticapitalist comedy? Boots Riley may have figured out how to make one

Boots Riley is in motion. During our recent interview, the writer-director is on the phone while traveling in a car from his home in Oakland to a hotel in San Francisco for a full day promoting his new movie “I Love Boosters.” The film had its local premiere the night before at the historic Grand Lake Theater and, rather than sounding morning-after bleary, Riley is energized, overflowing with ideas.

Riley, who, at 55, has been unapologetically calling himself a communist for more than 30 years, brings an unusual level of political commitment and consciousness to his work. “Boosters” is a rascally, freewheeling comedy touched by an absurdist sensibility, but it’s also deeply attuned to issues of workers’ rights and structures of power. Riley’s previous feature, 2018’s “Sorry to Bother You,” was about a telemarketer who uncovers a larger corporate conspiracy.

All of which is rooted in the much larger goals Riley has his eyes on. Yes, he wants his $20-million movie — the largest production investment ever for its distributor, Neon — to make its money back, but he also wants to convey a forceful message to audiences whether they walk in expecting one or not. Can a movie in wide release across the country and backed by an Oscar-winning studio convey genuinely revolutionary thoughts?

“The world that I hope to see created is one in which the people democratically control the wealth that they create with their labor,” Riley says with a mix of calm and charisma that’s invigorating. “Now, why do I want that? That has to do with people. I like people and I think there’s a way that we can get there in order to counter those in power just doing whatever they want to do.”

Even as he veers into heady territory that could seem didactic, Riley maintains a low-key charm like a professor in his off-hours unspooling a few big ideas.

“What I’ve seen in my life is what makes people get involved in stuff is optimism. And not a disconnected fantasy — optimism that says: We can do this and then this other thing will happen. And so for me, that’s not about stale stuff, that’s about connecting to the joy of life, connecting to laughter and the beauty of other people.”

Raised largely in Oakland, Riley became involved in local activism at a young age. His work as a musician in the years before he turned to filmmaking honed his understanding of audiences and sense of showmanship.

The candy-colored “I Love Boosters” is a movie that isn’t afraid to reset itself, evolving and reconfiguring its storytelling as it goes along. Corvette (Keke Palmer) runs a crew of thieves who steal from clothing boutiques, then resell at a significant discount. But what she really wants to be is a designer in the mold of mogul Christie Smith (Demi Moore), who oversees a fashion empire — that is until Corvette comes to understand some of the true costs of Christie’s goods, the underpaid human labor that brings it into being.

The cast includes Naomie Ackie and Taylour Paige as Corvette’s accomplices, Eiza González as a revolutionary fellow traveler, Poppy Liu as the Chinese factory worker who opens Corvette’s eyes to what’s really going on and LaKeith Stanfield as an enigmatic stranger who may open her up to much more.

This description of the film does not even begin to include some of its more outrageous features: a teleportation device powered by Marxist dialectics, villains conveyed in stop-motion animation, a thrilling car chase done with miniatures and Don Cheadle in prosthetics that render him practically unrecognizable.

“I Love Boosters” is also the title of a song on the 2006 album “Pick a Bigger Weapon” by Riley’s long-running rap group the Coup, including such lines as “Most of it was made by children in Asia / The stores make money off of very low wages.” He says the movie isn’t a direct adaptation of the song. Rather they are drawn from the same motivations and inspirations.

Since the film’s raucous premiere in early March at South by Southwest, Riley figures he has seen it well over 25 times with audiences, in part because he has been on a promotional tour of colleges.

“It’s always like a rock show,” Riley says. “I’ve been taking it back to the indie music days and just beating the cement.”

Everywhere he has shown the film, audiences have responded in largely the same way, often laughing so loudly they drown out lines of dialogue. To Riley, it means that his stories can travel, finding universal truth in the specific.

“I get underwhelmed by movies that basically are supposed to be any place and anywhere, but then end up being no place and nowhere,” he says, “It’s contextual to the language you speak and the food you eat and the music you listen to and all of that. I think people have to have a specific point of view and their points of view don’t have to be as radical as mine, but they have to really care about something.”

Both of Riley’s features as well as his 2023 Prime Video streaming series “I’m a Virgo” have a strong, active visual imagination. Pushing things even further with the eye-popping look of “Boosters,” he worked with cinematographer Natasha Braier (“The Neon Demon”), costume designer Shirley Kurata (an Oscar nominee for “Everything Everywhere All at Once”) and production designer Christopher Glass (“Ms. Marvel”), to make the world of the film as inventive as possible.

“For me, I’m heightening contradictions,” Riley says of his film’s handmade aesthetic. “That’s also something I bring from music. You can talk all the time about what technically should work, but what matters is making you feel a certain thing.”

Riley is mindful that his film’s more outré moments don’t detract from the underlying emotions he is trying to convey. Also that it be fun.

“Music videos, for instance, they’re interesting to look at but they’re not often moving,” he says. “So what I have to do, my main thing that ties all this together, is humanity. And I get that through the character writing and the story, but also through the performances. I have to combine all of those things to make the visceral parts work, to connect to the character’s emotions. And even if you don’t get it consciously, you’ll just feel this movement as you go.”

Stanfield, who also starred in “Sorry to Bother You,” recalls first meeting Riley at a party at the Sundance Film Festival.

“I liked the fact that he had a really big afro,” says Stanfield in a separate call from San Francisco the morning after the Bay Area premiere, “and he had mutton-chop kind of sideburns and I was like: I like this dude’s style, man. I like the fact that he’s able to just be himself.”

Stanfield’s laconic intensity is the perfect foil for Riley’s own unpredictability. The actor recalls Riley first telling him about what would become his character in “I Love Boosters” before the script was even written.

“He just said that it’s going to be a character unlike any character you played, which is true,” says Stanfield. “And that it’s someone that is trying to find a way to connect to others. And this guy has been alive since the beginning of time. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is very interesting.’ And it turned out to be all of those things.”

Riley is unusually active online, often mixing it up with fans and detractors alike on social media. Recently he got into an extended series of posts on the platform X, where he was attacked for working with with producer Megan Ellison, daughter of tech billionaire Larry Ellison and sister of Paramount Skydance chairman David Ellison.

“It’s part of how I engage with the world,” he says matter-of-factly. “Whether it’s worth my time or not, that’s a whole other thing.”

Riley acknowledges that there is rarely ethically pure money to be found in the world, so that financing for something like a feature film will likely have to come from sources unlikely to pass strict purity tests.

“So there’s no getting out of it,” he says with a sense of thought-through clarity. “And also, that’s not my goal. That never was part of my goal. My goal is to help create class struggle and help to create this mass militant, radical labor movement.”

By this time, Riley has hopped out of his car and — as signaled by the “thank yous” and “you’re welcomes” that punctuate his responses — made his way to where he will finish getting ready before his press day. None of which stops the flow of ideas.

“There’s many other reasons to decry and be against what Larry Ellison is doing,” Riley continues. “Because it’s old school, robber baron sort of s—. And I do speak out about that. But my point is, we’ve got to have some power to change the way things are and that power is only going to come from being able to have the working class stop capital when it wants.”

A deep analysis of class dynamics and labor is already unusual enough from a filmmaker. And then there are the hats. Riley has taken to wearing outsized hats for most press events for the new film, a look that is as distinctive as it can be an invitation to parody. He currently has about six in rotation in a variety of colors and gets them from the London shop Uptown Yardie, which makes them in tribute to Jamaican heritage.

As with many things in the Boots Riley universe, the hats are partly fanciful and partly practical. He started wearing them in 2022 or so and last year intended to retire them because they can be cumbersome to travel with.

And yet he discovered they had another purpose.

“I read a thing with [Jean-Luc] Godard talking about how he had to make himself this character to sell his movies,” Riley says. “And you don’t think about Godard thinking about marketing. And so for me, I was like, ‘I gotta sell this movie. Let me bring the hat back out.’”