Film review: Red Rocket takes an amusing trip into a forgotten corner of industrial America
Washed-up porn star meets donut shop in Sean Baker’s frequently funny and deeply humanistic followup to The Florida Project
Red Rocket opens at International Village Cinemas on December 17
DIRECTOR SEAN BAKER is a filmmaker who likes to settle into a place and give you a chance to really live in it. In The Florida Project, viewers got to know every tired walkway, stairwell, and lobby chair in the bubblegum-pink motel. Now Baker moves due west to Texas’s Gulf Coast, and if that glamorous name has you picturing white sand and ice-cream coloured beach houses, think again. The waterfront is blocked by the endless tubular tangle of a refinery that roars and thunks all night. Elsewhere it’s a landscape of houses with peeling paint and chicken-wire fences, plus all-night Food Stops and, of course, towering “Make America Great” signs.
Chaos arrives in the form of Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), a down-and-out former porn star—and a classic bullshit artist who believes his own lies. To the blasting strains of ‘NSync’s ridiculous “Bye, Bye, Bye”, he appears—bruised, beaten, and penniless—on the decrepit doorstep of his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), and her denture-deprived mother, Lil (the incredible Brenda Deiss). The less-than-warm greeting: “Oh my shit!” He’s conned them before, but with a mix of charm, flattery, and southern manners, he convinces them he’s going to get a job (“I’ll teach fuckin’ karate if I have to!”) and help them fix the place up. In the hands of the supercharged Rex, Mikey is a hyperenergized man-child with the attention span of a five-year-old: “You need a guy around,” he reminds Lexi and Lil, and then: “Hey! There’s a dragon fly!”
With potential employers not so impressed by his AVN awards and 81-percent XXX click rates, he resorts to dealing weed to the local refinery workers, wheeling around town on an old women’s bicycle. There’s no denying it: the dude is a hustler who can sell, sell, sell.
Heaven in this bleak corner of working-class America comes in the form of the Donut Hole—a yellow and orange oasis of pink-sprinkled treats. It’s here that Mikey falls for its creamy-skinned clerk, the 17-year-old Strawberry, played by uncannily talented newcomer Susanna Son. She sees him as her ticket out of Texas City, while he—as usual—can’t help but see her as his chance at fame and fortune in the porn world, amateur or otherwise. Strawberry is bored and obviously talented beyond this backwater, as glimpsed in a scene where she sits at a cheap electronic piano, naked, and unleashes a rendition of “Bye, Bye, Bye” that’s equal parts Joanna Newsom and Regina Spektor. Son is so luminescent in this role that you’ll squirm every time she’s with Mikey’s oily hustler—or should that be predator? Baker tries to suggest that she’s the one holding the power, but it’s hard not to cringe at the matchup. Mikey is what the porn world calls a “suitcase pimp” and beneath the laughs, there’s obviously something sinister about what he’s doing. On the other hand, the director treats Strawberry like a heightened fantasy who may or may not be another of Mikey’s delusions. Let’s just say it’s complex.
Into this mix, throw a cast of beyond-colourful characters—Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), the lonely loser next door who becomes Mikey’s makeshift chauffeur; Leondra (Judy Hill), the wary druglord who negotiates at her back-yard picnic table by the chickens and the smoker barbecue. Mikey befriends everyone he can, but demonstrates an odd and narcissistic lack of empathy, whether he’s chastising Lonnie for lying or refusing to help Lexi get her kid back from child services. Still, their interactions are frequently hilarious.
If it sounds like the filmmaker is making fun of the good folks of Texas City, think again: Baker takes a humanistic, nonjudgmental approach to sex work and drugs, cleverly focusing on the kind of “have-nots” of industrial America who usually never make it onscreen. One of the only scenes where we ever glimpse the “haves” is when Mikey, up to his old tricks, pretends to Strawberry that he lives in a nouveau-riche mansion on the better side of town. As he enters the yard, he’s greeted by a well-dressed woman locking and loading her shotgun—one person who definitely isn’t going to buy into his bullshit.
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