Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Sean Baker
Starring: Simon Rex, Suzanna Son, Bree Elrod, Brenda Deiss,
Judy Hill, Brittney Rodriguez
The idea of a troubled adult returning to their hometown has fuelled
American indie cinema for several decades at this point. Such movies
usually feature a protagonist who finds what they've spent their adult
life searching for in the last place they would have thought to look –
the Podunk town they fled many years ago. If said protagonist is male,
he'll no doubt find himself in an unlikely relationship with some manic
pixie dream girl who teaches him life lessons and gets him back on
track.
With his wildly entertaining drama Red Rocket, writer/director Sean Baker sticks a banana in the exhaust pipe
of this Sundance cliché. Yes, his movie features a troubled man
returning to his hometown and attracting a pretty young woman, but
Baker's film is brutally honest about the reality of how such a scenario
is most likely to play out.
For a start, his protagonist, Mikey (Simon Rex), has no
redeeming features and is unlikely to learn any life lessons. He arrives
in his old stomping ground of small town Texas with his tail between his
legs. And it's quite a tail. Mikey has spent the past 17 years working
as a male pornstar in Los Angeles but has returned with a bruised body
after getting into some ambiguous trouble. Despite their initial
protestations, Mikey uses his seedy charm to inveigle his way back into
the home of his ex-wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) and her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss).
Lexi and Lil have correctly pegged Mikey as a wrong 'un, but decide to
give him another chance. When Mikey starts producing enough cash to pay
the rent, they happily look the other way and don’t question where he
got the money (he got it from selling weed for a local dealer). Lexi
even allows Mikey back into her bed and Lil thanks him for bringing her
daughter some happiness again.
Meanwhile, Mikey is hitting on the underage Raylee (Suzanna Son), who works at the local donut shop, and begins committing statutory
rape on a regular basis. His interest in Raylee, who likes to call
herself Strawberry, is purely professional however, as he's grooming her
for porn stardom, his ticket back into the business.
Using a largely unknown cast, many of whom he cold-approached in the
street, Baker creates a world that feels identifiably American in a way
so few American movies tend to. With his movie star looks, Mikey stands
out from the denizens of his hometown, who all look like people who have
lived rough lives. Somewhat ironically, Baker frames these people in
Norman Rockwell-esque tableaus that find a stark beauty in the donut
shops and strip clubs that dot this particular landscape. When they
become a "couple," Mikey and Raylee resemble Martin Sheen and Sissy
Spacek in Terrence Malick's Badlands, two people whose fresh looks stand out against a world that's gone
stale on the shelf.
Like the films of the Safdie brothers, Red Rocket has a
manic energy matched by a sociopathic protagonist that makes for a
highly captivating but somewhat draining viewing experience. Mikey
sweeps through this world like a tornado, leaving chaos and devastation
in his trail, but as played by Rex, he possesses an undeniable charm
that makes it easy to understand why people are willing to give him a
chance. The movie runs for 130 minutes but feels like it's no more than
half that length. The narrative barely gives us pause for breath and a
scene set on a rollercoaster plays like a distillation of the entire
narrative.
Many viewers will likely have first discovered Baker through his 2015
film
Tangerine. That movie had a similar breakneck pace as it followed a pair of
trans prostitutes across a day in their messy lives in Los Angeles. Like
Mikey, those protagonists' lives were a trainwreck, but in their case
they were passengers on a train driven by a society that didn't accept
them. In Mikey we get a protagonist who is consistently given
opportunities. He's at the controls of the train and will ultimately be
responsible for its derailment. The question is how many casualties
he'll cause along the way.
Red Rocket is on Netflix UK/ROI now.