Red Rocket (2021 | USA | 128 minutes | Sean Baker)
Sean Baker’s enduring interest in the frequently-overlooked lives of ordinary struggling Americans, especially those who make ends meet with sex work, continues with Red Rocket. But here, he drops a golden god and his giant schlong among them as an instigating agent of mischief. Simon Rex returns from his long slumber as Mikey, the physically “blessed” anti-hero who long ago left Texas City for the bright lights of Los Angeles’s adult film scene. It turns out that his pledge to “leave and never look back” has an expiration date. After decades away during which he ascende the heights to an award-winning (“Best Oral”) film career, he, like so many stars before him, has been chewed-up, spit-out, and returned to the life he once fled.
As the film opens to the strains of N*SYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye”, we see Mikey asleep as America passes by on a cross-country bus ride. Like Scrooge’s prophetic ghosts, the iconic 2000 hit will make multiple visitations to the film, each with its own revealing spin on the past, indication of the present, or prophetic implications for the future. Baker uses soundtracks and cuts masterfully throughout. As the Scandinavian-produced American boyband earworm smashes to a close, we absorb the quiet and follow Mikey as he finds himself literally bruised, emotionally broken, yet optimistically walking from the station, through his old hometown, to the front door of the house that his long-estranged, mostly-forgotten ex-wife Lexi (longtime New York theater actor Bree Elrod, making her film debut) shares with her mother and a sweetly-mannered pit bull. Their first reaction to his unexpected arrival is the right one: immediately chasing him off their overgrown lawn and telling him to never come back.
But with a face like Rex’s and a reality-distorting sense of self-delusion, he’s easily able to charm his way into a brief stay with a promise to help make ends meet by contributing to weekly rent. His logorrheic recap of riding a wave of modest success to an inevitable crash back to earth conveys a sense of his delusional optimism. In a fast-talking monologue, he blames his downfall on everyone but himself, but it’s fairly clear that his recent spiral of misfortune is largely one of his own doing. By the time his promised short stayover has stretched from days to weeks, he “graduates” from sleeping nude on the family couch with wake-up calls courtesy of his mother-in-law’s morning appointment with The People’s Court into re-establishing a place in his ex’s bed (sometimes without the assistance of the little blue pills he keeps in his velcro wallet). As he eventually integrates himself into the rhythms of their daily lives, his return to “normalcy” would almost be heartwarming if any of it was sincere.
One night, celebrating his successful entrepreneurial endeavors in the world of small-time drug dealing via an arrangement with the neighborhood’s no-nonsense weed queenpin, he takes the ladies to a visit to the local donut shop for sweet treats. While they’re thrilled to spend his newfound cash on all the sugary pastries they can eat, he catches a glimpse of a girl working behind the counter. Her appearance upends the film’s dynamic by instantly setting Mikey’s his scheming heart ablaze with both lust and visions of triumphant return to the industry with fresh new talent in his pocket.
First-time actor Suzanna Son plays Strawberry, the underage redheaded who becomes the object of Mikey’s obsession. Baker “discovered” her in an ArcLight lobby in 2018, kept her well-developed Instagram on file, and brought her into the project. She brings a fresh face to the film, creating a character with beguiling confidence and bemused attraction to Mikey and his initial advances. Although the actress is in her late-twenties and the film makes it clear that in Texas her seventeen-year-old character is “legal as an eagle”, that doesn’t make his seduction of the young woman any less uncomfortable. Their relationship would be inadvisable on the basis of the cavernous gap in their ages and worldly experiences alone, but here it’s a courtship of asymmetrical power dynamics built on a foundation of self-flattering spin, omissions of inconvenient truths, and outright lies.
We watch Mikey be a total dirtbag, deceiving his ex-wife, charming a younger awestruck neighbor into giving him rides around town, and grooming Strawberry into feeling like she’s in the driver’s seat as their sexual relationship deepens. He skitters along the surface even as his every interaction sets up its own looming disasters. Yet Rex plays Mikey as a predatory puppy dog, all smiles and hustle. When he’s gleefully biking under pastel twilight skies on a yellow cruiser (the titular “red rocket”), sweet-talking Strawberry along a carnival’s neon-lit waterfront, and always advancing his own goals while trying to convince himself and others that he’s doing them a favor, it’s impossible to look away.
As was the case with Tangerine and the Florida Project Baker’s casting of many first-time actors and inclusion of local personalities grounds the film with a specificity of time and place. (I would have happily watched an entire film about Judy Hill’s Leondria, her pot operation, the family dynamics of her no-nonsense daughter and useless son, and their role in the community.) Characters occasionally make comments about the dark history of the Gulf coast in the slave trade before it became a nexus for offshore drilling, setting a context for the area’s history. Meanwhile clips from the 2016 election make their way into the background as foreboding reminders of the dangers of falling prey to the promises of another kind of huckster. Still, amid the struggles, crumbling towns, industrial landscapes, and fading dreams, his camera is never immune from finding beauty.
The juxtaposition is never more stark than in Simon Rex’s squirmy, nuanced, and committed portrayal of Mikey and his BDE that’s likely borne in part by having spent a lifetime looking like Simon Rex. You feel disgusted by his self-serving manipulations, yet understand how all these people allow this charismatic chaos gremlin into their lives. It’s an all-time performance with depth underlying the shiny surfaces, but also a thrill ride with a built-in expiration date. The artful construction of this captivating film is how Baker keeps us onboard, both eager for the much-deserved comeuppance and also dreading bearing witness to it. It’s not exactly fun, but you won’t regret the price of admission.
Red Rocket has a limited theatrical run beginning on December 10th and releases widely on December 25th. (Images courtesy A24)