Part anticapitalist satire, part buddy comedy, part heist movie, “I Love Boosters” is a messy, brilliant sendup of the absurd contradictions of our savage era of inequality and political corruption. It asks us: When theft defines a social system, what’s the difference between the individual acts of ordinary people and the collective behavior of the powerful?

The movie’s heroine goes by the nickname Corvette. Played by a luminous Keke Palmer, she lives in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant in Oakland and dreams of becoming a fashion designer; she plasters her makeshift home with her supernatural, candy-colored streetwear creations.

Corvette idolizes a famous, girl-bossy fashion mogul named Christie Smith, played by a delightfully unhinged Demi Moore. Smith sells her clothes at a highly successful chain of stores called Metro Designers, offering flashy, expensive streetwear in a single color at each outlet. Want a different color? Go to another store. Corvette keeps a well-thumbed copy of Smith’s “Lean In”-style manifesto on her night stand, bristling with Post-it notes.

Metro Designers is a favorite target for Corvette and her best friends, Mariah and Sade. The crew, the so-called Velvet Gang, have perfected an ingenious method for their elaborate heists. Corvette, Mariah and Sade, all of them Black women, stuff their oversized outfits with clothes while a pair of large Black men — participants in the scheme — pretend to get into a fistfight. A white woman, another confederate, distracts the salesclerks with feigned hysteria over witnessing Black male violence. In the melee, the Velvet Gang waddle out with their booty.

These thefts are common enough, and bold enough, to catch Smith’s attention. In a television interview, she refers to the Velvet Gang as “low-class, urban bitches” and vows to punish them. In her telling, the members of the Velvet Gang “have no style, they have no ingenuity. They steal it from me.” Smith, it turns out, is a thief on a grander scale. Corvette discovers that Smith’s company copied one of Corvette’s far-out designs, a sculptural jumpsuit festooned with Jurassic scales on its arms and legs.