With 2015’s Tangerine and 2017’s The Florida Project, writer-director Sean Baker felt like he was carving out his own genre in modern Hollywood filmmaking. Casting mostly non-actors in major roles and unafraid to depict and analyze the more tragic and seedier parts of American life, both films presented stories and characters who’d previously felt ignored by film with enormous humanity and depth. His newest film, Red Rocket, takes much the same approach, but the intellectual and emotional payoff isn’t quite as satisfying.
The film follows Simon Rex’s Mikey Sabre, a former porn star who returns to his hometown of Texas City, Texas broke, battered and desperate to find a way back into the industry that’s ostracized him for reasons unknown. He moves in with his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), also a former adult film actress, and proceeds to take advantage of her and everyone else he meets. Chief among them is a teenaged girl named Strawberry (Suzanna Son), who works at the donut shop where Mikey ends up selling pot to construction workers. As Mikey grooms Strawberry into becoming his ticket back into adult films, the lengths he goes to maintain his lies become both more extreme and more absurd.
Given the above, it probably goes without saying that there’s a lot of wild stuff going on in Red Rocket, and its a testament to Rex’s strength in the role that the movie holds it all together. Considering Rex has spent much of his career in bit parts in far less prestigious projects, it’s perhaps surprising that he gives such a tour-de-force of smarmy, comedic charisma here. But there’s a thrill in watching him play such a fast-talking fraud even though Mikey is clearly so detestable. When he goes to the woman for whom he used to deal pot as a kid only to be unwittingly tricked into selling trash, we both marvel at his hustle and laugh at the ways he fails. And while Rex is certainly the standout, every actor–professional and not–seems perfectly dialed into the same, darkly comedic tone.
While Tangerine and, less so, The Florida Project contained moments of dark humor, Red Rocket is Baker’s most straightforward comedy yet. Mikey is a messy nightmare person constantly trying to manipulate his way to success and there’s a perverse joy in watching him be a total scumbag. It’s funny to watch him drive Strawberry to her age-appropriate boyfriend’s house only to get his ass kicked by the boy’s parents a few scenes later. It’s funny to watch him wait until Strawberry drives away before running away from the mansion he pretends is his own.
Though Red Rocket is certainly consistently humorous in a way that feels wholly new to Baker’s work, it’s also missing something essential that’s made his other films so impactful: his empathy. Even in its most ridiculous moments, Tangerine never let the audience forget its characters’ essential humanity. They did absurd things and reacted in ways that felt heightened, but the wildness of their lives was in direct contrast to their inescapable sadness and we loved them for it. That affection is absent here. We enjoy (at least initially) Mikey’s hucksterism, but he and pretty much every character are treated with a level of smug superiority that feels new for Baker’s work. Certainly, there are moments where we’re meant to feel bad about the way Mikey takes advantage of Lexi or share in June’s (Brittney Rodriguez) disdain for him, but the characters are all essentially ridiculous in a way that sets the audience above them.
Admittedly, that’s integral to the satire Baker establishes here. This is a modern take on A Confederacy of Dunces and Mikey is Ignatius J. Reilly if he were a handsome, clever former porn star with ambition. The characters’ absurdity and thinness is part of the way its makes its points. However, it’s worth questioning how effective this satire about charming con artists ultimately is.
Though Red Rocket began production well into the pandemic, it feels like a film made well before it and released well after it would have been most ideologically relevant. With its 2016 setting and the constant, if oblique, references to the previous presidential administration, it’s impossible to miss what Baker is trying to say here about the ways individuals and America as a whole are both susceptible to and constantly producing charismatic charlatans. If the film had been released, say, last year prior to the election, it might have felt like a biting send-up of our current sociopolitical climate. However, now, a year on and with very different troubles on our collective minds, the film feels like it’s dwelling on the past. Simon Rex is giving the performance of his career and he’s surrounded by a fabulous cast of actors and non-actors alike, but Red Rocket already feel like a relic.
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