I Love Boosters is an absurdist, politically precise heist comedy that follows a crew of Black women shoplifters as they take aim at a cutthroat fashion empire. Set in a “very colorful world” where “everything is real” and “no CGI” is used, the film operates on its own surreal logic to say something authentic about the world we actually live in.
LaKeith Stanfield’s character, the “Pinky Ring Guy,” arrives with a shorthand that tells you everything before he says a word. Defined by “Models, F-boy energy,” and a literal “soul-sucker demon approach,” he is a man constructed entirely from deliberate signifiers where the presentation is the character.
In our recent interview, Stanfield talked about how much of that construction was already on the page when he arrived and how much came from the work of figuring the man out.
“A lot of it was there. It was on the page,” Stanfield said. “Boots is a very skilled writer…What you see is what you get.” But Riley also creates space for something beyond the page. “He’s also a collaborator who is open to an artist bringing interpretation and being creative, and leaves space for that to be the case. He’s also brave. So you know he’ll be like, ‘All right, we’re gonna jump off this thing. Let’s go.’ And still very focused and very particular. If there’s something that he wants, he knows what he wants.”
That balance, freedom within specificity, improvisation in service of a director who knows exactly what he is building, is the condition Stanfield thrives in. He described coming onto the production mid-swing and immediately feeling the scale and intentionality of what Riley had assembled.
“Everybody around was working hard to bring across his very specific and beautiful vision…Everything is real. What you’re seeing is what you get. You might think it’s CGI. You might think it’s this. It’s not. There was a lot of intricate effort put into it.”
In a film built around the fashion industry, the costume choices carry weight beyond aesthetics. For Stanfield’s character, those choices were the result of an extended collaboration between Riley, Stanfield, and costume designer Shirley Kurata, a process that Boots described as efficient, restrained, and creative trust.
Riley was effusive about what Kurata brought to the process.
“A lot of costume designers, when they see something like this, they’re like, ‘This is my chance. This is my chance to do my fashion line.’ And so we’re going to build all this stuff and then you end up with not enough money to do very much at all,” Riley said. “But Shirley doesn’t have her ego tied up in that.”
Kurata designed the full wardrobe, including a standout turquoise piece and a plaid construction built from scratch, but kept the process grounded in what would actually serve the character and the story rather than the opportunity to showcase her own vision.
Stanfield picked up the thread from there, talking about what the conversations with Kurata actually looked like. “She was just very, very efficient. Like you said, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. And we wanted to do something a little unique. We knew that we had the context of a very colorful world. So we would play within that.”
The color theory conversation that emerged from those sessions went somewhere Stanfield didn’t expect. “It’s interesting how color theory works…Because when things are actually more colorful, you want to stay away from certain colors. You think, for example, especially when things are monochromatic. And so we talked a little bit about that, and I was learning about it, and also how colors play off of Black skin. We got into the science of that. So it was real cool.”
The pinky ring guy draws from a particular strand of Black musical history. Riley cited Ready for the World, the 1980s R&B group known for their flamboyant style, as one influence and the American rock band, Fishbone.
Check out the full interview. ‘I Love Boosters’ hits theaters May 22.
Photo Credit: Instagram/ILoveBoosters
