Keke Palmer in Boots Riley’s Out-There Riff

“I Love Boosters” has a flaky, what-the-hell-let’s-do-this effrontery. It’s the first movie Boots Riley has written and directed since his debut feature, “Sorry to Bother You,” which made a subversive splash in 2018. And if you’re wondering whether the rapper-producer-filmmaker has toned down his brash satirical style of funk surrealism, have no fear: The new movie is every bit as out there, maybe more so. “I Love Boosters,” which opened SXSW tonight, is a cosmic send-up of fashion consumerism, with a vision that doesn’t always cohere. Yet if anything, it’s a more spirited piece of fun than “Sorry to Bother You” was. It’s an incendiary prank of a movie that begs our indulgence at times yet also invites us to get high on what a playful provocation it is.

In the opening scene, the camera follows Corvette (Keke Palmer) into an Oakland nightclub, where she saunters around looking for prey. She fastens on a handsome stranger and invites him back to her flat around the corner; from the look of things, we think she might be a sex worker. She’s selling something, all right, but it’s not sex, it’s clothes: the racks and racks of outfits she’s got stashed, all of which have been boosted. The dude is outraged — he thought he was there for a good time — but then, just as he’s ready to storm out, he asks if she’s got any shoes in a size 10.

“I Love Boosters” is a comedy of capitalist desperation. It follows Corvette and her two comrades, Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), who together form an outlaw trio of shoplifters known as the Velvet Gang. Their motto is “Fashion. Forward. Philanthropy.” They’re inner-city Robin Hoods of couture: They steal from fancy stores and hawk the clothes at discount prices out of car trunks and bathroom stalls. The movie is about how they go up against a fabled designer, the monomaniacal Christie Smith (Demi Moore), who’s a genius of branding but orchestrates her diva empire as a form of control.

In a Boots Riley film, you know that control is the enemy, because the director stages things in a way that deliberately spins out of orbit. Yet it’s not arbitrary — he’s creating a stylized version of the real world. “I Love Boosters” might have had the makings of a more conventional commercial comedy, but the way Riley works it’s like a ticky-tacky version of “The Devil Wears Prada” meets “Set It Off” meets “Ghostbusters.”

What lures us in is the quippy camaraderie of its stars: Keke Palmer, in her multi-colored punk-bob wigs, as the imperious Corvette, who’s an aspiring designer herself (she actually worships Christie Smith, though she recognizes what a treacherous person she is, especially after Christie steals one of her designs); Naomi Ackie as the leonine sensualist Sade; and Taylour Paige as the passive, sly Mariah. These three get us rooting for them, even as the movie turns into a magical-realist fable that just keeps growing more deranged. 

Early on, Don Cheadle has a droll cameo as a potbellied motivational speaker with long dreds who’s really a pyramid-scam hustler, and the point is: This is what the money culture has come to — scams for suckers. The film presents boosting as an act of insurrection from the street up. Yet the first thing you notice about the Velvet Gang is that they seem to be boosting in a world without security guards or surveillance cameras; at one point Corvette walks out of a store wearing a pink jumpsuit literally stuffed with 10 layers of clothing. But that’s all part of the film’s fairy-tale flipness.

Corvette, Sade, and Mariah are hired at a Metro Designer store, where the entire showroom is coordinated, each month, to one color, and where the store manager — played by a delightfully unhinged Will Poulter — is a fascist bitch who literally gives his workers 30 seconds to scurry in and out for a lunch break. There were moments when “Sorry to Bother You” was like Riley’s version of “Idiocracy,” and for a while “I Love Boosters” suggests his hell-of-retail riff on “Office Space.” But then a booster named Jianpu (Poppy Liu) shows up from China. She has the power to suck all the clothes out of a store in 30 seconds. How? She’s using a teleporter, which is also a “situational accelerator” (it takes whatever you’re seeing and exaggerates it to its essence). And the movie, without blinking a heavily mascaraed eye, enters the reality-hopping realm of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

We’re cued to see what a fabulist Riley is from the scene where Sade gets together with a sexy nightclub bystander (LaKeith Stanfield, posing like something out of a Prince biopic), who turns out to be a literal serpent demon in the bedroom. You either go with this or you don’t. And what you must also go with, in the film’s knowingly insane second half, is a teleportation comedy that’s a satire of global capitalism (it involves a Chinese sweatshop whose workers are revolting), and of how the mass narcotic that makes the whole system work is fashion: our obsession with people like Christie Smith, who lives in a literally tilted apartment (like the villains on the old “Batman” TV series). Demi Moore invests her with a comic dynamism that shows you her inspired performance in “The Substance” was no fluke.

By the end, “I Love Boosters” has gone full gonzo: corporate suits who get stripped of their skin, a giant rolling scrap ball of bills that’s like all of Corvette’s anxieties rolled into one. The movie, a tall tale of clothes encounters, doesn’t always work. Yet there’s something disarming about how Riley’s sense of play holds this street-smart meta-rebellion fantasy together. He loves boosters, and everything else he shows you.