At their most fundamental, Sean Baker’s movies are ultimately about America. Both Tangerine and The Florida Project find him delineating the true heart of the country by examining those on the margins of society, who oftentimes most honestly represent what it means to live here. Add in recurring preoccupations regarding socioeconomic injustice and the validity of sex work mixed with an empathetic, vibrant immediacy in the depiction of his outcasts, and you have a defining voice for representation of contemporary Americana.
For Red Rocket, Baker’s interests have brought him to Texas; Texas City, to be precise. The year is 2016, election coverage is on every television you can find, and riding back into his run-down refinery hometown via bus is one Mikey Saber (Rex, former pornographic actor, model, and MTV VJ). A washed-up adult film star with an energetic, charming demeanor to only mildly offset his contemptible actions and narcissistic ego, Mikey still seems to think he’s hot shit even after falling through in his career and running back home to beg his estranged wife Lexi (Elrod) and her mom, Lil (Deiss, just one of several inspired street castings), for hospitality. He manages to convince them, not that anyone else wants anything to do with him – he goes on a halfhearted job search, but no one in this town wants to hire someone who did something as inconceivable as porn.
Mikey essentially resorts to running weed for the begrudging town supplier Leondria (Hill) and bumming around with an acquaintance he vaguely recognizes from his youth, Lonnie (Darbone), who he basically just uses to cadge free rides off of. You’d suppose he could be doing worse things and that maybe a redemptive arc is shaping up, until the depths of his calculating, egregious behavior are revealed. A visit to the local donut shop ends in a gross infatuation with the 17-year-old girl working the counter, Strawberry (Son). This quickly develops into a 40-year-old man stringing along a naive high schooler who he sees as his one-way ticket back into the game in Hollywood, while she believes she found someone who may actually love her.
With all of this, Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch have made something close to a full-blown satire, documenting the exploits and blunders of someone who is essentially the villain of the movie. Mikey Saber is such an ingeniously realized piece of shit that takes over and completely wrecks the lives of every single person he comes across for the sake of his own personal gain; every relationship he pretends to rekindle or newly foster is purely transactional and brazenly fake. He’s portrayed with a disturbing vitality by Rex, who deserves a litany of nominations for his performance of such a knotty character. He has to toe that ever-so-tight line of making someone as terrible as Mikey watchable as the focal point of the film, and he pulls it off with arresting magnetism and sometimes even endearment. He’s often genuinely funny, but it’s never far out of sight how much of a sociopathic husk he is. Maybe all that Trump and Clinton coverage isn’t just a coincidence.
As is typical by now, Baker (along with cinematographer Drew Daniels) captures the ethos and texture of America on the fringes in a way not many others do. The 16mm photography makes scenes feel remarkably dynamic and alive, sometimes punctuated by a sporadic crash zoom or abrupt cut to the soundtrack – the recurring motif of ’N Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye” is particularly memorable as well. It all gels to make Baker’s most nuanced character study yet, one that’s often as hilarious as it is horribly uncomforting. It’s clear that Mikey is partially a result of his environment, but it’s never out of the question that deep down he’s just a horrible person, instilled with ferocious self-absorption and destructive masculinity. More than either of Baker’s previous features, Red Rocket concentrates on that ambiguous line between where a person’s mistakes or flaws can be chalked up as the result of a precarious economic reality, and when they go too far past the brink to become someone that’s simply beyond justification or redemption.
This article appears in December 17 • 2021.