These Boots Were Made for Boosting: A Communist Review of I Love Boosters

by D. Everett

Boots Riley's I Love Boosters is a celebration of worker solidarity, but it is also something much more. It is a document of the state of progressive film-making and leftist organizing in the current period. In his debut review, D. Everett shows how Riley plays with and critiques in practice stereotypical portrayals of Black characters in media, and holds up a mirror to society's fears and neuroses of the poor.
But I Love Boosters' story and ending is also a document of something else—capitalist realism, and the way that what we can envision is determined by what we think is possible.