I Love Boosters review: Demi Moore is back for more body horror in this brash fashion-industry satire

I Love Boosters

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Director: Boots Riley

Cert: 16

Starring: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Demi Moore, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter

Running Time: 1 hr 53 mins

I doubt anyone guessed that Demi Moore would pick lunatically heightened social satire as her route to late relevance. Boots Riley’s latest is not quite so disgusting as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, but it is, if anything, even less inhibited in its embrace of Swiftian phantasmagoria.

LaKeith Stanfield’s toothy sex lizard runs the Fargeat picture close for traditional horror shocks. When one party of antagonists lose their skin they remain disturbingly revealed – anatomical drawings made life – for the rest of the picture. The later stages have much to do with a hand-held teleporter. You certainly won’t see anything else quite like it this month.

Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, from 2018, deserved the acclaim it received for its take on racism in corporate life. I Love Boosters feels very much like the undisciplined follow-up to such a breakthrough hit. Moving on to a satire on the fashion industry (emphasis on “industry”), the new film is bigger, brasher and more ambitious. It also loses its way something rotten in a chaotic closing act.

[ From the archive: Boots Riley: More than happy to bother youOpens in new window ]

It is very like Riley to begin such a project with those at the bottom of the heap. Corvette, Mariah and Sade are a trio of San Francisco shoplifters – boosters, in local slang – who deal mainly in clothes half-inched from an upmarket chain owned by the formidable designer Christie Smith (Moore). This so-called Velvet Gang (Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige, all excellent) develop a lucrative line in flogging the goods at more affordable prices.

From there the film widens out into a wide-ranging assault on a business that has always offered the widest barndoor for the satirist’s blunderbuss.

The film cannot be faulted for its ambition, most notably in design. The Velvets live in what was once a fried-chicken restaurant. Christie inhabits an apartment with a dramatically raked floor that, while making day-to-day life a nightmare, offers unmistakable rhymes with the topography of San Francisco. As the action sweeps on we connect with misused workers as far afield as China.

I Love Boosters, as enamoured of cinema’s possibilities as any early Jean-Luc Godard film, probably requires a second viewing to get all its elements in alignment. Does that count as a backhanded compliment? Better that than none at all.

In cinemas from Friday, October 30th