If you see one movie in theaters this year, make it I Love Boosters, Renaissance man Boots Riley’s wildly inventive, absurdist comedy crime caper and love letter to the San Francisco Bay Area.

What’s a booster? Musician, writer, producer, filmmaker, and activist Riley (Sorry to Bother You) defined the term in The Coup’s eponymous 2006 rap anthem: “A booster is a person who jacks from the retail/ And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale.” Both song and film pay tribute to the “hardworking women who risk jail-time just to make them a living.”

The film follows Bay Area boosters Corvette, Mariah, and Sade (Keke Palmer, Taylour Paige, and Naomi Ackie), who steal clothes from high-end fashion designer Christie Smith (deliciously played by Demi Moore). Our anti-heroines hardly live large, squatting in an abandoned chicken joint they deck out with DIY interior design flourishes. In their striving to make ends meet, they also serve the public as modern-day Robin Hoods, robbing the rich to give to the poor. Christie calls them “low-class urban bitches.” Corvette, herself a young fashion designer, feels flattered that Christie knows they exist but is also determined to exact revenge by cleaning out Christie’s entire inventory. In a sci-fi twist, they join forces with Jianhu (Poppy Liu), an exploited factory worker that teleports from China to the Bay using a top-secret government contraption that helps the Velvet Gang level up their theft game.

Villainizing the women of color whose gumption paves the way for (spoiler alert) a worker revolution rests on ignoring the world that makes illegal business necessary for survival, says Riley. “We have an economic system built on theft, that also necessitates poverty.” Christie’s thievery arguably inflicts greater damage given her vast power and wealth, highlighting the chasm between the toll of corporate crime versus street theft. She steals Corvette’s design for a futuristic suit priced to sell for 100K, along with employee wages and factory workers’ lives, killing them with cancer and silicosis from sandblasting jeans and other occupational health hazards.

Riley aims to unsettle viewers: “What I want to do is compel people and repel people at the same time.” As a sociology professor, I got a little hot at Marxian references to “dialectical materialism.” But you don’t need a PhD to understand Riley’s message. He challenges our moral assumptions about right and wrong, wrapped up in a clever, funny, visually stunning experience that transports us to a world where we can make change.

Aspiring to spark “visceral action” with Boosters, he transcends empty diatribes against capitalism to inspire people to leverage concrete tools within their reach to organize, such as joining a labor union. “And right now, what we need to change the world around us is a mass, militant, radical labor movement, one that uses the withholding of labor as a tactic and a strategy to be able to have policy change.”

As the daughter of a former booster, I have skin in the game. After arriving in New York City in 1975 as an undocumented Chilean immigrant, my father was driven into the underground to economy to survive. Before he entered the clothes-stealing business, Dad escaped high unemployment and dangerous work in Chile’s nitrate mines.

Despite precarious living conditions, he spun humorous stories of his vagabond migratory journey, sleeping on the beach, crammed into one room with ten other men, and crashing at a brothel for a time. He met an old Chilean man who boosted for a living, sometimes going to jail but never for long: “You want to work or you want to steal?” “Work,” Dad said and strung together shadow economy jobs: washing dishes, working on the cleaning crew of a dry docked ship, and painting window frames on high-rise buildings.

Dad turned to theft once he couldn’t find aboveboard work without risking deportation. The old man had already tutored him in petty thievery. To survive, he stole clothing from Macy’s and other department stores, peddling the pilfered goods at bars and the National Maritime Union building. Despite the political upheaval of Chile’s 1973 U.S.-backed military coup, Dad’s asylum petition was denied. He finally obtained a green card through marriage to my mother. We lived a stone’s throw from the garment district, in affordable housing sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU)  Upon receiving working papers, he was hired as a janitor and later an elevator operator at the same building where he once fled immigration. After twenty-five years, he retired with a 32BJ-SEIU union pension.

Those of us from the working-class don’t often see our struggles on screen. As Kurt Vonnegut observed, “Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick…”

But Riley shows us in our full-fledged, flawed dignity, as artists creating the street style that large-scale businesses co-opt, rather than blank canvases for corporate entities to profit from. Fashion gave my father protective armor in an unforgiving world that often looked down on and discriminated against him. After his shift, he carried his doorman uniform cap home in a shopping bag rather than wear this shame. But donning a dapper suit at the Copacabana Club was like putting on Superman’s cape, allowing him to access a more authentic identity that commanded the respect and admiration denied him elsewhere.

The Bay Area is a central character in Boosters. Riley brings its denizens to life in all our acid-colored glory and honors this incubator that nurtures boundary-pushing art, revolution, and social change. The opening credits showcase Oakland’s International Boulevard, including my walking paths and favorite produce market in Fruitvale, my adopted second home. With gritty affection, wit, and respect Riley delivers a love letter to an easily disparaged place where he grew up and still makes his home. Rooted in local pride, Oakland-based music duo Tune-Yards composed the film’s score. In-jokes abound, such as a nod to San Francisco’s real life leaning and sinking luxury Millennium Tower, with exaggerated slanted floors where villain Demi Moore conducts her nefarious business.

We should all love boosters. Many of us can recognize ourselves in the plight of struggling people with dreams and the loneliness of Riley’s boosters, assuaged through connection in organizing and worker solidarity.  Ostensibly I’m now “middle class,” whatever that is. But like many I’m also facing growing precarity and the AI tsunami threatening workers like me.

Strategizing survival is overwhelming, which is why it’s more important than ever to carve out the time and space for art that motivates us towards positive change and support artists who give us the tools to persevere. Systems of exploitation thrive on us being distracted, exhausted, and ground down. I’d almost forgotten the power of going to the theater, removed from the usual interruptions. Boosters is hilarious and riotously entertaining but isn’t casual viewing with its winding plotlines and big ideas. Blink and you might miss something. We deserve to give this important film our full attention. We can’t afford not to.