From Sorry to Bother You to I’m a Virgo, Boots Riley has built a reputation for creating stories from a unique perspective. His latest project, I Love Boosters, continues in that same direction while taking aim at fashion, class, and the underground economies operating beneath expensive labels and luxury storefronts.

Set in Oakland, the film follows Corvette, played by Keke Palmer, and her crew of boosters as they steal designer clothing and redistribute it throughout their community. Riley traces the roots of the story back nearly 20 years to “I Love Boosters,” a song from his group The Coup, where he examined how Black and Brown communities often influence fashion trends while remaining priced out of the spaces profiting from them. “For a lot of people in places like Oakland, buying boosted clothing was the only way to engage in the very >Taylour Paige, LaKeith Stanfield, Demi Moore, Don Cheadle, and Will Poulter, the film blends absurdist comedy with social commentary in a way that has become Riley’s signature. Humor, according to the director, remains central to how he approaches storytelling. “People laugh and joke in all kinds of situations,” he says. “For me, the humor makes it more real.”

Ahead of the release of I Love Boosters, Riley spoke with ESSENCE about the creation of the film, political storytelling, working with Keke Palmer, and why contradiction often sits at the heart of comedy.

ESSENCE: I Love Boosters was birthed from the song “The Coup,” which was nearly 20 years ago. At what point did you realize that it could become a film?

Boots Riley: In about 2017, I was thinking about the worlds that I wanted to explore in my next stuff and it all gelled together. It started gelling when 2018 we sold Sorry to Bother You at Sundance, but it was for exactly the amount that investors had put in so I was broke and WME was like, “Hey, well, if you got ideas, we’ll help you sell them.” And that’s where that started.

The city of Oakland plays a major role in the film too. Why was it important to set that story there specifically? 

I mean, it’s what I know. I think specificity is what makes things more universal. I think because I was an organizer early on in my life, it was put upon me that I was more effective being where I knew a lot of people, where people trusted me, where I knew where things were. So, I think once I became an artist, that also translated. My music is 90 something percent written in and from the perspective of myself living in Oakland, my films are that as well, but I think people can relate to it wherever. When I saw Do the Right Thing, when it first came out, that was in Brooklyn. It physically looked alien to us. There’s buildings together, people’s houses touching each other and stuff like that. 

It looked like Sesame Street. But we related to it because it felt authentic to the experience that Spike and maybe some of the other actors were having and it related. So there that makes it relate. It’s important to me to have it be from a place as opposed to a lot of stuff that tries to be every place and no place. 

You have an amazing cast in this film—specifically Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige. How did the cast come together for this film? 

Well, I DMed Keke on Instagram. I asked her, “You want to read a script?” She was like, “Yeah.” We talked on the phone, and then we went and had lunch. I saw a performance from her in the movie Pimp—I saw her before I met with her. I saw her doing something very different from what she had been doing in previous films, which was a certain cadence, a certain way of being. And then when I talked to her, I saw parts of her that hadn’t come forward in movies before. And so that was really important to me. Lakeith’s character, we won’t talk about what it is, but I actually had that character before I had the movie. I told him that I wanted him to play that role

Don Cheadle, I met him 20 years ago in passing—he happened to be in Oakland—so I kept in contact with him. With Taylour, I had been a fan of hers and reached out. But there’s a fair number of people on here who I have to give credit to. My casting director, Rebecca Dealy, was like, “You need to look at these folks.” One of those was Will Poulter. I knew him as a child actor.

He was great in The Bear, too. 

Yeah, I hadn’t seen that at that time. So that made me look at all of his stuff. And so there was Eiza Gonzalez, who also got passed to me. And then to me, obviously I was a fan for a long time and we just reached out to her and she was game. So, once you have Keke, then you have a magnet pulling things and you have a way to kind of orchestrate others.

It’s funny, because before Keke, I was really concerned with having the right acts. A lot of actors, especially Black actors, try to have a non-geographical accent, very calming, very rounded. I may do that myself too, but in real life, a lot of people don’t do that. Same thing with Will Poulter, by the way. A lot of people think he’s from the U.S., but he’s just really good at his accent. 

A lot of your work is satirical and I wanted to ask you about that. Why do you think humor works so well when you’re trying to pursue political storytelling or critique systems?

Well, first, I think it takes a lot of work to take the humor out of life. If you write something with no humor, you’ve done a lot of work to take that out. So when I see stuff that’s a “drama,” it feels way more false to me because people laugh and joke in all kinds of situations—traumatic things, depressing things and it’s so much a part of life—especially for Black folks, and I’m assuming for everyone. For me, the humor makes it more real, but separately, both tragedy and comedy have irony in common. 

You’re looking at the irony, you’re looking at the contradiction. That’s what you’re pointing out when you’re pointing out an irony. A lot of standup jokes are pointing out the ironies of life. You’re like, “Oh, you’re laughing partly because you are acknowledging that that’s real.” And so that’s what analysis is, is often pointing out the contradictions, how things work against each other, you’re highlighting certain things. So, I’m often highlighting contradictions, and to highlight the contradictions, I have to heighten them. Heightening the contradictions is often what’s called “absurd” about the humor that I do, because that heightens them to a level to where it’s not a one-to-one, it’s not exactly realistic, but the emotion around it is.

So, I think it’s effective because it’s the same thing we do when we talk about why we tell a story about what happened and why something was fucked up. We embellish it with the different details, but then we heighten that part like, “And you know what happened? You’re not going to believe this part, blah, blah, blah.” That’s us highlighting that and heightening it. And so yeah, I think that’s why it works. One, it’s real too, it heightens contradictions that we know are true. 

Ryan Coogler said in an interview a while back—and apologies if I’m misquoting—but he said when he’s around you, you always have a sense of calm and peace about you. What do you attribute that characteristic to?

I don’t know. I think I’ve always talked slowly, and then also I think I have an analysis that tells me that there are things that are possible to do and that we just have to execute the right steps. I have an analysis that tells me that there’s a lot of solutions to the problems that we have and that there is a way for us to build power and both of those are one thing which has to do with class struggle. And I also have an awareness of history to know that some things have worked before, some things haven’t.

So, for me, I have an urgency, but I have a clarity and that might be what would be called calm. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m always calm, but I think that might come across in that way. I know what I want to do. I know what I have to do. I think that what we need in order to have power, is a mass militant radical labor movement that is able to use the withholding of labor as a tactic and strategy to be able to get policy change and that’s part of the clarity is understanding what power is and how power works. Power under the system is capital. And so those who make the capital, who produce the capital are the working class and so we can collectively control that.

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