Riley got his first taste of insurgency at age 15, when he and a few friends staged a 2,000-student walkout after their local school board threatened to hold classes year-round. Later, when he started the Coup, he ignored the music-industry types who cautioned him that socially conscious rap wasn’t particularly commercial. (Those advisers were mostly correct, though the group did accrue strong critical plaudits and land a little airplay on MTV and BET, counting Tupac and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello among its fans.) And when Riley was pitching I Love Boosters to investors, he had to figure out how to squeeze an effects-heavy chase sequence into a relatively modest $20 million budget without shortchanging his vision. For what it’s worth, this is the most expensive movie that Neon—the trendy studio behind Parasite, Longlegs, and Anora—has released to date.
“When I’m going through hardships to make my art, you kind of feel like, ‘I’m paying my dues,'” Riley says. “The struggle is part of the process. You gotta have something that you’re more passionate about than the art itself, though—something that you are so passionate about that you gotta tell everybody.”