The Memorial Day Sleeper Worth Skipping the Multiplex For
Neon is making a bet this Memorial Day weekend, and it's the kind of bet that genuinely interesting distributors used to make all the time before the calendar got eaten by IP. While Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu swallows the multiplexes whole, Neon is putting Boots Riley's I Love Boosters on hundreds of screens nationwide, leaning on a wave of critical heat and Riley's own grassroots outreach to his fans. It's counter-programming in the truest sense — a candy-colored, anti-corporate stoner heist movie aimed straight at adults who'd rather laugh than sit through a Grogu reaction shot.
The good news for that bet: the reviews are in, and they're spectacular. The film currently sits at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus describing it as a raucous capitalist critique careening through Boots Riley's chaotic imagination. That's not a mild rave — that's the sort of number that should turn a specialty release into a genuine adult-audience event.
Here's the pitch: Keke Palmer leads a crew of professional "boosters" — Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Eiza González, and Poppy Liu — who target Demi Moore's tyrannical fashion empire, with Will Poulter scene-stealing as the mall security muscle trying to stop them. It's Riley's first feature since Sorry to Bother You, and it cements him as the most distinctive voice in American satire movies working today.
What I Love Boosters Is Actually About
The mechanics are deceptively simple. Palmer plays Corvette, the de facto leader of the Velvet Gang, recruiting her crew to lift couture from Moore's fashion empire while chasing a "magic bag" MacGuffin that functions as the film's structural engine — a Pandora's box of a prop that keeps the heists escalating and the politics sharpening.
The screenplay grew out of Riley's 2006 song with his band The Coup, which shares the title, and you can feel the decades of marination in the texture of the world: the bodega philosophers, the back-room fences, the casual fluency with which the gang reads a store's blind spots. This isn't research; it's a worldview.
IndieWire calls it "the first socialist stoner movie of the Trump era," which is a useful frame if you're trying to gauge how political the comedy gets. The answer: very political, but never humorless. What I Love Boosters is not is a slick heist movies procedural in the Ocean's mold. It's closer to a surreal fable — musical interludes, dream sequences, monologues delivered straight to camera — that happens to have some of the best-staged lifts in recent memory.
The Cast Is Doing Career-Best Work
Hustlers Connection: Keke Palmer as Corvette
Critics have been calling Palmer a great physical comedian for years, but I Love Boosters is the role that finally collects every one of her registers — the conspiratorial glee from Hustlers, the wide-eyed terror beats from her horror work, the live-wire variety-show energy — into a single leading-lady showcase. Corvette is a part written for a star who can pivot between slapstick, righteous fury, and tenderness inside a single take, and Palmer doesn't miss a beat.
Demi Moore as the Fashion Mogul
Coming off her work in The Substance, Moore could have coasted. Instead she takes a villainous victory lap — imperious, vain, gleefully malevolent in a way that rhymes with the Coralie Fargeat performance without repeating it. Where Elisabeth Sparkle was the tragedy of being chewed up by the machine, Moore's fashion mogul is the machine, and she plays it with a relish that confirms her late-career renaissance is no fluke. It's one of the year's most purely entertaining performances.
Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige as the Velvet Gang
IndieWire's reviewer calls the Palmer-Ackie-Paige trio comic geniuses, and that's accurate. Ackie's deadpan is the secret weapon of the ensemble — she can deliver a Riley monologue about surplus value as if she's reading a takeout menu and somehow make it land. Paige, meanwhile, channels some of the same coiled, can't-look-away physicality she brought to Zola, and her chemistry with Palmer gives the film its emotional spine. Eiza González and Poppy Liu round out the crew with note-perfect supporting beats.
Will Poulter as Mall Security
The breakout supporting turn critics keep singling out. Poulter plays his hapless-menace security guard somewhere between Midsommar-grade dread and pure slapstick, and the calibration is uncanny — he's terrifying for about ninety seconds, then ridiculous, then somehow sympathetic, often inside the same scene. It's the kind of performance that gets a supporting actor nomination if a studio campaigns for it.
Boots Riley's Visual Grammar, Refined
Where Sorry to Bother You announced Riley's worldbuilding — the horse people, the white voice, the late-stage swerve that divided audiences — I Love Boosters deepens that grammar without the structural gamble. This is a more confident, better-funded film, and you can see Annapurna and Neon's combined backing in every frame.
The production design works as argument. Moore's fashion-empire headquarters reads as a literal castle of accumulated labor — a visual thesis that the cast confirmed in interviews was Riley's specific intent. Every gilded surface is a worker's unpaid hour. Every couture display is a supply chain made monstrous. Riley doesn't have to underline any of it because the sets do the talking.
The musical interludes and surrealist cutaways now feel funded rather than scrappy, and the Hollywood Reporter's SXSW review hit on the right adjectives: wild, weird and delightfully unique. This is the rare studio-adjacent comedy that doesn't feel algorithmically smoothed.
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Roll the DiceThe Politics, and Why They Land
Here's the smartest thing I Love Boosters does: it aims its critique at a specific industry — fashion-house labor practices, sweatshop supply chains, the gap between a $4,000 handbag and the wage paid to assemble it — rather than at capitalism as a vague abstraction. That specificity is why it works as comedy instead of as a lecture. You laugh at a particular target, not at a TED talk.
In the Collider cast interview, the ensemble describes the film as a blueprint for a revolution smuggled inside a star-powered Trojan horse, and the review consensus suggests Riley pulls the smuggling off cleanly. The film talks like an organizer because Riley is an organizer.
Stacked against other politically engaged genre films of the 2020s movies, it lands ahead of the pack. It's more playful than Triangle of Sadness, which relied on its audience's recognition of the rich as gross. It's more coherent than Don't Look Up, which mistook celebrity sneering for satire. And it's funnier than both because Riley actually believes in the people he's writing about — the gang's chemistry sells a utopian sisterhood at the core of the film, and the anti-capitalist movies streak never overrides the heist pleasures. The lifts are staged with real craft, the gags pay off, and the political content sits inside the entertainment rather than on top of it.
The Verdict and What to Watch With It
See it theatrically while Neon's wide release holds. Riley's compositions and the costume work — and Moore's wardrobe alone is worth the ticket — deserve the big screen. The musical sequences in particular have a scale that will not translate to a living room.
For a follow-up, pair it with Sorry to Bother You for a Riley double feature that traces his evolution as a filmmaker, or with Hustlers for a Palmer-led caper night that doubles down on women-running-game energy. If the satirical fashion angle hooks you specifically, The Devil Wears Prada 2 arrives later this year, and the conversation between Riley's grenade and that legacy sequel will be one of the more interesting accidental dialogues of 2026.
And if you're stuck between I Love Boosters and the family-friendly multiplex options this weekend, a quick spin on RandomFlix's Roll the Dice button can settle the Memorial Day debate faster than another round of "what does everybody feel like."
Bottom Line
I Love Boosters is the rare political comedy that earns both its laughs and its fury, anchored by a Demi Moore performance that confirms her late-career renaissance is no fluke and a Keke Palmer turn that should reset every conversation about her range. Boots Riley has made the most politically alive heist movie of the year, and he's done it without sacrificing a single joke.
It's the underrated pick of the weekend and a strong early candidate for the year's best comedy movies. The 92% on Rotten Tomatoes is correct. The 8% is wrong. Skip the Mandalorian, find a screen showing this, and go.