CHICAGO, May 25 - This Memorial Day, eighteen comrades and friends met at a movie theater here to see Boots Riley’s new movie I Love Boosters. Two comrades had seen an early screening of the film and met Boots there (and gave him a CHALLENGE). They enjoyed the movie so much that they organized this larger group trip to the theater. Our group was multiracial, multigendered, and intergenerational, with the youngest attendee being 12 and the oldest in their 70s.
Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters dropped against the backdrop of a cascading global crisis: nearly 300 million workers worldwide surviving on less than $3 a day (International Labour Organization, January 14, 2026), the U.S. labor participation rate collapsing to 61.5% (Fortune, July 8, 2026), and more than 1.2 million immigrant workers vanishing from the American labor force between January and July 2025 out of fear of deportation under MAGA fascist Trump’s (see glossary) most aggressive immigration crackdown yet (PBS News, September 1, 2025).
The movie centers on Corvette, played by Keke Palmer, a Black woman worker and aspiring fashion designer who makes ends meet by “boosting” high fashion clothes from stores and reselling them at a steep discount in her neighborhood. She works with her crew, Sade and Mariah — together known as the Velvet Gang — who help steal the clothes by creating diversions. The film draws out multiple other, far costlier thefts committed by the bosses: wage theft, In the U.S., wage theft is the largest form of theft in the country: employers steal an estimated $50 billion from workers’ paychecks every year (Economic Policy Institute, September 11, 2014). It also highlights the theft of workers’ health through terrible working conditions, and the theft of Corvette’s fashion ideas by the rich fashion mogul Christie Smith played by Demi Moore.
Boots takes the narrative in many directions, and one of the most moving is when the Velvet Gang meets Jianhu, a worker from a Chinese garment factory who reaches the U.S. using a situational accelerator, an experimental teleportation device she and her cousin discovered at the plant — one Christie’s company had been using to cut shipping costs while suppressing workers’ wages. Jianhu and her fellow workers suffer from “sandblasting sickness,” a real illness caused by the hazardous fabric-distressing techniques used to manufacture Christie’s jeans, and the film lays their exploitation out in stark, unflinching detail. Jianhu joins the Velvet Gang, and together they turn their attention from small-time boosting to a full assault on Christie’s empire — first testing the device’s power to transform and “deconstruct” the stolen garments, then plotting to infiltrate Christie’s fashion show and seize a fortune in stolen designer suits.
The film takes real artistic risks and uses symbolism cleverly — for instance, Christie’s penthouse office sits atop a skyscraper built at a bizarre, gravity-defying tilt, and she is the only one who can stand up straight in the room, while the Velvet Gang struggles to keep their footing. It’s a sharp visual metaphor: capitalism keeps workers permanently off-balance while those at the top glide through it with ease.
Along the way, we meet various misleaders of the working class: a soul-sucking demon posing as a love interest, the pyramid-scheme huckster Dr. Jack, and pro-cop/anti-affordable-housing media plants — all of whom turn out to be working in league with Christie to keep working people divided. There is also a worker named Violeta who helps organize Christie’s store employees and factory workers alike, using her own technical know-how to help the crew unlock the device’s full power. Along the way, the crew is introduced to dialectical materialism, the science communists use to analyze and understand revolutionary social change.
And yet the film shows its own limits. The ending cannot push past labor disruptions into true communist transformation. Strikes against Christie’s company and its factories spread across the world, forcing an end to the sandblasting process and winning workers a reassessment of hours and pay. Jianhu returns home to China to find that the device’s deconstruction process has reversed the damage done to her mother’s health from years of factory work. The global shutdowns win real, material gains for workers — but Christie remains wealthy and in power, signaling that these are socialist crumbs rather than the end goal: workers win concessions, not control. The Velvet Gang opens their community center, selling affordable clothes and supporting workers’ rights, turning their hustle into a lasting base for organizing. Yes, worker’s consciousness is transformed which is a victory, but it doesn’t lead to Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) solution which is workers in power, breaking our shackles from capitalism permanently, ushering in the communist transformation of society.
After the movie, we discussed some of its themes and our favorite parts in a grassy courtyard beside the theater. Everyone agreed that international worker solidarity, a major throughline of the movie, was the best part, and that the ending was especially inspiring. We disagreed on why some choices were made — like the crew’s use of the teleportation device — but we all agreed that seeing this movie and discussing it together was a great time. It was a fun way to explore serious ideas through art and humor. More communist art and outings in the future, please!
