Red Rocket (2021)
Directed by Sean Baker
After hitting rock bottom in Los Angeles, former porn star Mikey Saber returns to his hometown in Texas to stay with his estranged wife and mother-in-law. Just as tensions begin to ease, he becomes infatuated with a young doughnut shop worker named Strawberry.
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Part douchebag boyfriend and part Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross , Rex has a persistence only matched by the dickishness written for him.
In essence, this time around Baker recuperates Simon Rex as a weathered porn star similar to what Paul Thomas Anderson did for Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights (1997), whose Dirk Diggler is a point of comparison.
All of these characters would be right at home on an episode of “The Jerry Springer Show,” and though the movie builds to an appropriately trashy finale — one that offers “Boogie Nights” a run for its money shot — the climax isn’t nearly outrageous enough.
If Dirk Diggler, the hustling and hustled porn star from 1997’s Boogie Nights , were to find himself in 2016, he might look something like Mikey Saber—the bedraggled adult film star who occupies the frenzied center of Sean Baker’s latest film, Red Rocket .
Pull Dirk Diggler from his darkest point in Boogie Nights , teleport him through time and space to the tiny town of Texas City, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of Mikey.
That prevents it being the Boogie Nights -style portrait of a place and personality type I suspect Baker is going for.
As Mikey, Rex is reminiscent of the love/hate inspired by Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems (2019), a user and a loser whose narcissism dictates his every move.
Like Adam Sandler in “Uncut Gems” (another alternate title the film could have used), Mikey is a manic small-time scam artist who recklessly flirts with self-destruction.
It also extends the filmmaker’s winning streak, starting with 2015’s Tangerine and 2017’s The Florida Project, while wallowing in the sort of glorious Amerindie aimlessness that’s become Baker’s specialty.
This is hardly the first time co-writer/director Sean Baker ( The Florida Project , Tangerine ) has cast an actor with a real-world résumé to match their part.
My guess is that as soon as I begin to describe the plot of “Red Rocket,” the latest from Sean Baker, his first film since the acclaimed “The Florida Project,” a number of you will dismiss it entirely with some combination of anger and disgust.
“Red Rocket” is the latest blazingly original gem from director/co-writer Sean Baker, who in films such as “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project” has displayed an uncanny ability to carve out offbeat slices of life in the American subculture.
Co-written and directed by Sean Baker, Red Rocket never quite strikes the deep wells of empathy found in Tangerine and The Florida Project (at times the movie comes perilously close to feeling like a stunt), but as a character study it’s incisive and unsparing.
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Mikey is a larger-than-life suitcase pimp whose origin story probably involves Bradley Cooper’s character from “Silver Linings Playbook” stepping into the same telepod with Howie Bling and Tim Robinson, and he never stops working the angles.
Considering that “Red Rocket” is only a stone’s throw and a few thousand miles away from the likes of Judd Apatow’s “The King of Staten Island,” it’s easy to imagine how the Hollywood version of this story would make Mikey more likeable as the movie went along.