Red Rocket
A porn star returns to his wife and hometown in Texas to make amends and upset the apple cart.
Industrial length: Suzanna Son and Simon Rex
After a few minutes into Red Rocket, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to work out what the title refers to. The film’s protagonist is one Mikey Davies (Simon Rex), a handsome, affable, high-spirited, eager-to-please hunk whose mission would seem to be to please everyone in the dead-end town of Texas City, Texas. Mikey has fallen on hard times and appears hell-bent on making amends, having turned up unwanted at the ramshackle home of his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), and his toothless, monosyllabic mother-in-law Lil (Brenda Deiss). Per the title, Mikey turns out to be an adult performer whose more recent on-camera escapades has seen a slackening of his professional prowess. Another blatant narrative device is the fast-food outlet, simply called the ‘Donut Hole,’ where our devious protagonist seeks out his latest sexual victim, an underage girl young enough to be his daughter (played with some spunk by newcomer Suzanna Son). And so it turns out that Mikey’s reputation precedes him and that his need for self-affirmation comes at the cost of all comers.
Any director working outside of the Hollywood mainstream is going to attract his share of defenders and detractors. Sean Baker, still best known for his iPhone movie Tangerine (2015) and the award-laden The Florida Project (2017), remains an acquired taste. A champion of America’s underbelly and the marginalized, Baker bridges the gap between Harmony Korine and Andrea Arnold. Like Ken Loach, he tends to use non-professionals in key roles, to varying degrees of success. A professional actor is trained to disguise the artifice of his craft, while an amateur needs a very fine director to capture an unguarded moment. The trouble with Red Rocket is that the non-professionals look like they’ve been set up. This self-consciousness seriously detracts from the drama, while the outcome of the snail-like trajectory is visible a mile off. The main problem, though, is with the film’s star Simon Rex, who, inexplicably, was voted best actor by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Not only does Rex always seem to be acting – which possibly may chime with his character’s deception – but he gives a high-pitched, one-note performance that quickly becomes insufferable.
On top of this, Baker has filled his wide-screen frame with the detritus of an industrialised Gulf Coast, a landscape punctuated by oil refineries and smoke stacks. And to hammer home the message of a blue-collar America in-crisis, Baker has set his story in 2016, with the spectre of an incompetent president-in-waiting promising to ‘Make America Great Again.’ This is farce parading as social realism in which the dramatis personae are heavily-tattooed, drug-taking misfits. The question is whether to laugh at or to feel sorry for them. There has been an elegiac humanism at the heart of Baker’s earlier work, something sadly missing here. Even the sex scenes feel coyly artificial, pandering to a conformity that would be laughed off the screen in Europe.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Simon Rex, Bree Elrod, Suzanna Son, Brenda Deiss, Judy Hill, Marlon Lambert, Brittney Rodriguez, Ethan Darbone, Shih-Ching Tsou, Parker Bigham.
Dir Sean Baker, Pro Sean Baker, Alex Coco, Samantha Quan, Alex Saks and Shih-Ching Tsou, Screenplay Chris Bergoch and Sean Baker, Ph Drew Daniels, Pro Des Stephonik Youth, Ed Sean Baker, Costumes Shih-Ching Tsou, Sound John Warrin and Sean Baker, Dialect coach Nike Doukas.
FilmNation Entertainment/Cre Film-Universal Pictures.
130 mins. USA. 2020. US Rel: 10 December 2021. UK Rel: 11 March 2022. Cert. 18.
