With Red Rocket, Sean Baker has given us an adult American pastoral, essentially a comedy, and another study of tough lives at the margin, close in spirit to his lo-fi breakthrough Tangerine.
Actor, rapper, comedian and one-time porn performer Simon Rex gives an amusing performance as a washed-up adult movie actor with the unsubtle professional name of Mikey Saber. Mikey’s career in LA has gone south, chiefly because he had regular work in the spoof sex franchise The Fast and Fury Ass – but as the porn version of the character played by Paul Walker, whose death put a catastrophic downer on Mikey’s career.
Now, with no money and sporting cuts and bruises from unexplained disputes with various business associates, Mikey is sheepishly returning to his home town of Texas City, Texas, where he infuriates and astonishes his abandoned wife and former leading lady in the local porn scene, Lexi (Bree Elrod), by asking if he can crash with her for a couple of days.
After an unconvincing attempt to get a respectable job in one of the city’s various fast-food outlets, Mikey starts dealing weed, while resuming conjugal relations with Lexi and regaling everyone with stories about the glamorous porn career he intends shortly to resume. But then Mikey finds himself falling in love with Strawberry (Suzanna Son), a young woman who works at the doughnut store. He is convinced she is a porn natural and his ticket back to the triple-X big time.
The year happens to be 2016, when Hillary Clinton is facing off with Donald Trump for the US presidency, but it is tempting to read Mikey as the embodiment of Trump right now in 2021, in retreat from a disaster, brooding on his imminent return.
This is vivid, real-life film-making, without the need of an epic budget. Amusingly, when the plot calls for a multi-vehicle pileup, Baker shows us Mikey’s car going out of control, then cuts to the aftermath and reuses what appears to be genuine TV news footage of mangled cars on the freeway.
Mikey is a fast-talking hustler who has the predator-parasite’s instinct for drawing other people into his orbit, and convincing them that his interests are their interests. However, he is often far from successful in this, and there is an awful moment when he is savagely beaten up by the parents of Strawberry’s ex-boyfriend. But for all this, there is something poignant and even sympathetic about Mikey and Strawberry, and Baker lets us see that it would be sad if they wound up back in Texas City, but also just as sad if they made it to Los Angeles. You can picture Mikey growing old like the local people in Texas City, who are so very unimpressed to see him back.
• Red Rocket screened at the Cannes film festival, and is released in UK cinemas on 11 March.
