In 2016, the San Francisco district attorney’s office charged 16 alleged members of a shoplifting gang with theft and burglary. The so-called Rainbow Crew had become notorious for donning Technicolor wigs and ransacking luxury retailers in Union Square. Most of those arrested were in their teens and early 20s. 

A decade later, SFFILM hosted the West Coast premiere of “I Love Boosters,” the new feature from director Boots Riley, at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. The movie follows a group of fabulously (and colorfully) dressed women who steal from high-end designer stores in San Francisco and sell the loot for cheap in back streets and apartments. Riley said the film was inspired by his youth buying second-hand clothes from an earlier generation of “boosters.”

“You could put the word out,” Riley told The Standard on the red carpet Tuesday. “You could walk outside and talk to somebody and be like, ‘I need this, I need that.’ And they’d be like, ‘Let me see who got that.’”

Call it boosting, shoplifting, jacking, pocketing — the petty crime that turned San Francisco into a symbol of lawlessness five years ago is, in Riley’s film, a rebellion against wealth inequality and a DIY redistribution strategy. Riley explained that while he was familiar with the Rainbow Crew — or Rainbow Girls, as they were sometimes known — he came up with the idea for the film long before their rise to prominence and was more inspired by their predecessors. He broke down his admiration of this underground economy in a 2006 song, also called “I Love Boosters!,” by his rap group the Coup.

“A booster is a person who jacks from the retail / And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale,” Riley raps. “My shirt is from Stacey, my pants are from Rhonda / My shoes came out the trunk of a baby blue Honda.”

Both the song and the film cast boosters as Robin Hood figures — one character dubs her business “fashion-forward (f)ilanthropy” — which aligns with Riley’s experience.

“People don’t have money to afford all this stuff,” he said. “It’s fulfilling a service for folks.”

Local authorities in 2016 saw it differently, especially after the Rainbow Crew started pepper-spraying retail workers. A police lieutenant told CBS (opens in new tab) at the time that the thefts were “violent” and “scary for employees.” But some store clerks shrugged it off. Brody Nowak worked at a downtown clothing store in 2012 and remembers boosters like the Rainbow Crew barging in all the time.

“They would come to a store and grab everything,” recalled Nowak. “Or they would use booster bags, which are foil-lined bags, to avoid detection. I mean, they wore rainbow colors, so it wasn’t that secretive.”

Nowak said he mainly tried to stay out of their way.

“When it comes down to it, it’s a corporation’s money, so I didn’t really care,” he said. “There are definitely worse things that have been glorified in movies.”

This was a common sentiment on the red carpet, in a Q&A after the screening, and in buzzing sidewalk conversations after the movie let out. Spectators said Riley made them proud to be from Oakland, and they loved the film’s message. 

The news media has focused excessively on the damage boosting has caused to huge companies, Riley said — he specifically called out pharmacy chains, saying they used shoplifting to explain store closures that were actually caused by other factors — without considering the benefit it may bring to poor people or the rampant wage theft and worker exploitation they face.  

(The question of whether shoplifting is a righteous middle finger to capitalism or just plain antisocial dominated a tiresome online discourse last week after writer Jia Tolentino admitted to stealing four lemons (opens in new tab) from Whole Foods, and streamer Hasan Piker joked that she should go to prison.)

In the film, this small-scale, “Les Mis”-style justice collides with a workers’ movement that unites underpaid retail employees and exploited Chinese factory workers, coalescing in scenes of labor marches across the globe that caused the Oakland crowd to cheer and applaud. 

Some would say the messaging is heavy-handed and groan at the didactic explanations of dialectical materialism in the film’s second half. Why, if the message is so explicit, would Riley not just produce a manifesto or pamphlet instead?

“That hasn’t been working,” Riley said. “I don’t know the last time I read a pamphlet.”

He said he hoped the film would inspire workers to unionize, emphasizing that “we need a mass militant radical labor movement.” But if he can keep a lay audience laughing for two hours, entertain them with bright colors and sight gags, and sneak in some theory, that’s a success, he added. 

LaKeith Stanfield, whose male succubus character sends shockwaves through the screen with his sexual intensity, phrased it differently.

“We live in a world that seems increasingly imbalanced when it comes to power — the haves and the have-nots — and I think we all feel that,” he said. “We just wanted to speak to that and be a mirror.”

Despite his belief in the film’s populist message, Stanfield admitted that he has never bought shoes out of the trunk of a car.

“Unfortunately, I haven’t,” he said, “but hopefully one day I come across that special Honda.”