Red Rocket

Director Sean Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch follow up their acclaimed chronicles of life on America’s fringes, Starlet, Tangerine, and The Florida Project with another brightly colored window into a subculture rarely explored on the big screen. Red Rocket stars Simon Rex as Mikey, a former porn star who returns to his oil-and-gas hometown of Texas City after seventeen years in Los Angeles. Down on his luck, as Mikey often finds himself, he convinces his estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) and her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss) to let him stay with them until he gets back on his feet. Despite their past experiences with Mikey, the two give in to his persuasive charms.

Red Rocket proceeds as a study in the persuasive charms of its mercurial hustler protagonist and a fascinating exploration of how much a viewer can actively root for a character whose actions range from comically untrustworthy to abhorrently malicious. At one point Mikey confides to his young neighbor Lonnie that some in the adult film business referred to him as a “suitcase pimp”—a man in the porn industry who lives off a female talent. We can see in Rex’s performance that every fiber of Mikey’s being (at least in that moment) believes this accusation to be entirely false. Yet at this point in the movie, we have witnessed how Mikey is once again manipulating his ex-porn-star wife, and that he uses Lonnie for everything the directionless neighbor’s admiration will get him. He is also pursuing a sexy 17-year-old donut shop worker nicknamed Strawberry (Suzanna Son). Mikey believes he can groom Strawberry to become an even bigger porn star than Lexi was, thus setting him up again as a player in the adult film world. So he clearly is a suitcase pimp, and there are many moments in the picture when Mikey drops his bravado and sits with the knowledge that everything people about him is probably just as accurate.

Rex is electric on screen. It’s hilarious watching him try to con potential employees about how the skills he acquired having sex on screen can be applied to the menial jobs he hopes will provide him with enough cash to start fresh. In the end, the only work Mikey can land is with his former boss, Leondria (Judy Hill), a local marijuana dealer who runs a family weed business out of her home. Leondria’s daughter June (Brittney Rodriguez) is the one character who seems immune to Mickey’s appeal—and, in fact, totally baffled by it.

As in his prior films, Baker presents all his characters with empathy and dignity—they are comical but never caricature. We feel deeply for Lexi and Lil, who can smell Mikey’s bullshit a mile away, yet they still give in to his irritating magnetism. Those he cannot win over, he wears down. The easily exploitable Lonny also comes off as far more sympathetic than pathetic. And Strawberry is a fully dimensional character in total control of the few things she has any control over in life. She sees her sexuality as her one shot at getting out of the dead-end life she was born into just as Mikey did when he was her age. Yet Strawberry’s self-possession and self-awareness don’t let Mikey off the hook in the viewer’s eyes. The film never lets us lose sight of its protagonist’s narcissistic and criminal manipulations of this underage girl, but Rex’s ability to gloss over Mikey’s vanity and callousness seduce the audience right along with the characters. It’s fascinating how much we not only tolerate this guy but actively root for him to succeed every bit as much as we revel in his comeuppances.

Baker once again gets amazing performances from first-time actors. Elrod, whose only prior film credit is as one of the inmates in Shutter Island, plays Lexi with depth and humanity. She creates a character that most of us can easily relate to despite her circumstance. Deiss, a Texas native who unfortunately died of a stroke not long after the film’s release, makes the gap-tooth, chain-smoking Lil one of 2021’s most memorable characters. Both Darbone, a waiter at a local restaurant, and Rodriguez, a regular at the Donut Hole location, were apparently people Baker cast simply because he liked their looks. This director obviously has an innate knack for both spotting talent and incorporating what the actors and non-actors bring to the characters he writes to give the whole ensemble and the narrative a distinctive authentic quality. 

Much has been made of Rex’s background as an actual porn star, but that “career” only amounted to a few solo stroke videos he made when he was nineteen and in need of cash. His eclectic background includes stints as a model, MTV VJ, comedian, rapper, and actor—appearing in the Scary Movie sequels and several TV shows. Still, like his character, Rex is quite well endowed, and Baker uses this attribute to great comic effect without crossing the line into actual porn or exploitation.

The film, shot in 16mm by Drew Daniels, has an oversaturated look that makes us feel the sun and heat of the Texas location. We almost need to squint during every daylight exterior scene. The look is part of what makes the setting feel genuinely lived in. It feels like each character has inhabited this place for a long, long time.

I can’t say I relished this movie the same way I’ve loved the other Baker films I’ve seen. It builds to a similar conclusion as those in Tangerine, and The Florida Project, but while the final moments of those films are profoundly moving, the end of Red Rocket left me with an “is that all there is?” feeling. While each of Baker’s pictures gives audiences plenty to ruminate on after the final credits roll, none of them requires a second viewing to understand everything the movies have to offer. That’s not a knock; this is a case with many great pictures and, indeed, many bad pictures require multiple watches to get the full meaning of what the filmmakers intended. It was just that when I returned to Red Rocket for a second screening to see it in 35mm, I found myself getting a little bored at times—something that never happened with repeat viewings of his previous work.