Respond to these rapid questions in our Red Rocket quiz and we will tell you which Red Rocket character you are. Play it now.
In the subgenre of movies about narcissistic, sociopathic, motormouthed hustlers who skate through life on their good looks and/or charm, “Red Rocket” is yet another entry in the canon of films. The main character in this film is Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), a former porn star who still looks good for a guy who’s approaching 50 and has spent the better part of two decades living as if there’s nothing else to live for. Even though Mikey is tight-lipped about what exactly brings him back to his hometown of Texas City, Texas, the fragments of backstory he provides between boasts, lies, and mind games suggest that he did not leave Los Angeles on his own accord. He’s here to erase his past and begin anew: he’s here to live the American dream.
Mikey shows up at a bungalow near a refinery where his estranged wife and former porn partner Lexi (Bree Elrod) lives with her elderly mother, where they have been separated for several years (Brenda Deiss). Lexi refuses to let him in, but Mikey is persistent in his attempts to win her sympathy in order to gain access long enough to take a shower and borrow whatever clothes Lexi has that could be considered gender-neutral. In no time, he’s commuting to job interviews on her borrowed bicycle and, after failing every one of them, securing a position as a dealer with an illegal weed operation run by the coolheaded Leondria (Judy Hill) and her enforcer June (Brittney Rodriguez). Mikey’s fortunes will soon begin to improve. He begins to make plans for a future that will take him back to Los Angeles in order to reclaim his former glory and fortune.
If you ask Mikey if he has ever shown up unexpectedly in a loved one’s life with nothing but the clothes on his back, he will tell you that he is speaking literally rather than metaphorically. As the story of “Red Rocket” progresses, it becomes clear that this is Mikey’s default state. He is a naked opportunist who dresses himself in the trust of others. Everything about him is a fabrication, from his alleged celebrity (he claims his videos have a “81 percent click-through rate”) to his erections (which he claims to have) (courtesy of boner pills). A mess is created, and then he flees the disaster site, taking advantage of any opportunities to gain access to money or marijuana as well as sex, transportation, or lodging that come his way.
When it comes to realistic films about the rainbow coalition of the American underclass, the filmmaking team of director Sean Baker and his regular co-writer Chris Bergoch has amassed an impressive library at this point in their respective careers. “Red Rocket” is the most recent addition. Because of Mikey’s shamelessness and the reactions of those around him, it is frequently hysterically funny. (“Please inform your mother that I am not a dick, as she is beginning to shit with me.”) Lexi is yelled at by Mikey. ‘Why would I lie to my mother?’ Lexi wonders.
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However, it is also, in some ways, the least important of the items on the list. A one-note and repetitive section of this rambling 130-minute film occurs in the middle, when Mikey ensnares a freckle-faced 17-year-old donut shop employee named Strawberry (Suzanna Son) and plots to take her to Los Angeles and turn her into a porn star. The sexually explicit “Red Rocket” contains scenes in which the filmmakers aren’t exactly endorsing their protagonist’s middle-aged, borderline pedo-pimp obsession with Strawberry, but they aren’t being as rigorous in their mediating of it as they should have been. Furthermore, it is unclear from Strawberry’s writing whether we are meant to interpret her as an emotionally vulnerable and manipulative waif-fatale—i.e., a Mikey in the making—or whether she is simply pretending to be one because it excites Mikey and makes her feel bold and worldly. Strawberry’s writing is a mixed bag.
Mikey is immediately established by Baker and Rex as one of those grifters who presents himself as a sweet overgrown boy with a prodigious tool and an ice-cream face, but who will ruin your life and refuse to look back. Aside from a few blatant allegories, the action takes place in 2016 during the presidential campaign, with Donald Trump, the Mikey Saber of both business and politics, providing the narration throughout the production. However, we quickly discover that the script doesn’t have much to contribute to that initial impression. “Red Rocket” is similar to other works in this vein, such as “Mississippi Grind” and “Roger Dodger,” as well as the Safdie brothers’ scripted output, in that it peels a rancid onion from its core. More slime is always revealed when the question “What will the next layer reveal?” is posed to the audience.
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The opening and closing sequences of “Red Rocket,” on the other hand, are such perfectly tuned black-comedy contraptions that watching them unreel is as vertigo-inducing an experience as riding the rollercoaster that Mikey and Strawberry go on at an amusement park.
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Even in the face of these shortcomings, Baker’s best-directed film is measured solely by the economy with which he sets up and pays off each mile marker in the story, frequently entering and exiting a scene with only two or three elegantly choreographed but unpretentious shots. The wide-and-narrow frame gives the impression of being in a mock-epic. Featureless highways and flat grasslands, as well as flame-belching oil refineries, are revealed if it is possible that something heroic will occur there, which makes the spectacle of Mikey screwing up and doubling down all the more amusing.
Real-world settings are used to set the stage for Mikey’s schemering, screwing, and hustling, which is set against the backdrop of American decline. The cast (which includes a few seasoned professionals as well as many likable first-timers) is well-cast. Mikey gliding through the gutters of a country where a small number of people have a million times more than anyone needs, and everyone else is one layoff or medical diagnosis away from becoming a homeless statistic. From that vantage point, it’s easy to understand why Mikey is so determined to seize every fleeting moment of pleasure and triumph he can, in whatever way he can.
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The entire production is shot on 16mm film by cinematographer Drew Daniels (“Waves”), resulting in creamy/grainy images that evoke the charismatic bastard films of the 1970s, which Baker and company have obviously studied like scripture. You might end up with Mikey if you crossed Joe Buck from “Midnight Cowboy” with the title character of the modern western “Hud” (both Texans, by the way), then bashed him in the head a few times with a giant cartoon mallet. Mikey has grown into a six-foot-two-inch, ambulatory version of the part of his anatomy that he used to make a living with, and that no longer works unless he pumps it full of drugs
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An example of this is the inciting disaster that sets off Mikey’s comeuppance in the third act, which is one of those instances in which the cosmos presents a serial screwup with a metaphor for their life, but they are so lacking in self-awareness that they fail to recognize it. He’s like a film noir thief, dying at the foot of a street sign that reads “Dead End” and saying, with his last breath, “I didn’t realize this was a cul-de-sac.” “I didn’t realize this was a cul-de-sac.”
A contender for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor if the award could be given to an animal, Lexi’s shiner-eyed bulldog would be up for the honor. When the movie has generated a belly-laugh from his hero’s snowballing distress and you think it can’t possibly crank things up any higher, it cuts to the pooch staring at Mikey, as if it knows the man better than he knows himself, and you think you’ve seen everything.
Select theaters are now showing the film.
For more personality quizzes check this: Venom Quiz.
