Review: Sean Baker’s Red Rocket Takes a Sharp Scalpel to American Individualism

With Red Rocket, Sean Baker reveals another slice of our American capitalist underbelly. A kind of Harmony Korine with a softer heart, Baker embraces garishness in his depiction of wastrels, outcasts, and their environments. His films are simultaneously dedicated to the material realities of being poor in the United States and to the irreverent artificiality of snap zooms, smash cuts, and unexpected music cues. The result is a tone of dire comedy that doesn’t mock (all of) its characters, but rather the absurdity of the situation they’ve landed in—and of the desperate life habits they’ve adopted to cope.

Red Rocket—whose title, as any middle schooler could tell you, refers to a dog’s erect penis—features a trashily charismatic performance from Simon Rex as Mike, a desperate, amoral scoundrel trying not to let on that he’s reached his wits’ end. Known professionally as Mikey Saber, the character is a washed-up Los Angeles porn star who returns to his home town of Texas City, bruised and battered and looking for his ex-wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), to take him in for a little while. Except, as she reminds him while they’re arguing outside her house over whether he can stay on the couch or should get the hell out of dodge, they’re still married.

Rambling and making promises at a mile a minute, Mikey doesn’t let Lexi or her mother, Lil (Brenda Deiss), get a word in edgewise, but he quickly insinuates himself into their lives. The surprising thing, given his air of dishonesty, is that Mikey actually delivers on some of his promises, convincing a local (and very small-time) marijuana queenpin, Leandria (Judy Hill), to front him some weed and cash so that he can start dealing. Casually disregarding Leandria’s recommendations, Mikey is soon selling to the workers at the nearby oil refinery, the imposing outline of which hangs in the background of many of Red Rocket’s exterior shots. After this regulation-busting business maneuver, made possible through the use of a donut shop as a front for his drug-dealing, he’s not only paying his way, but supporting his wife and her mother, and has resumed his husbandly duties in the bedroom as well.

Mikey is introduced as a patently mendacious figure. Which is to say, it’s obvious who he is. But Rex’s charm can mislead the viewer at certain moments into sympathizing with Mikey’s unprincipled traipse through the donuts-and-cannabis economy of Texas City. Mikey constantly brags to Lexi’s neighbor, Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), about his five Adult Video News awards, and there’s more than a whiff of pathos to the obsessive way he clings to the idea that being a porno performer has granted him any status, financial or social. That none of Baker’s other characters line up with the kind of conventional morality that American politics always identifies with small towns can make Mikey’s grifting seem like just a part of the milieu.

But then there’s his pursuit of Raylee (Suzanna Son), a freckle-faced teen who works behind the counter at the donut shop. Mikey becomes obsessed with the pretty 17-year-old, flirting with her, lying to her about why he’s always riding a kids bike around town, and sharing joints wrapped in American-flag rolling paper with her. Baker’s portrayal of this seduction will probably turn some heads, as he doesn’t lay on the melodramatic moral judgment that many will view as compulsory in the depiction of a fortysomething sleeping with a high schooler. And Raylee, only as naïve as a teenager in one of Baker’s films could be, takes evident pleasure in their encounters. Son’s vibrant performance resists the reduction of the character to a mere victim, but all the same, the perniciousness of Mikey’s behavior is clear enough, and points to the hideousness that’s an especially visible component of American masculinity.

Red Rocket is set in late summer 2016, and throughout, we hear snippets of news reports about the presidential election, though no characters—particularly Mikey—seem to pay them much notice. Like the oil refinery that controls Texas City, it’s just background noise. But the sounds and images whose significance escapes Mikey is hard not to notice from our vantage point for how they speak to his utter self-absorption. Hustling is universal in Texas City, but Mikey’s the only one hustling for himself: Lil and Lexi look out for each other and share meth; Leandria’s family has her back; and even Raylee and the donut shop’s owner, Ms. Phan (producer Shih-Ching Tsou, who played a similar role in Tangerine), are a team before Mikey breaks it up with his predatory manipulations. Mikey, the big-dicked loser with delusions of grandeur that even he doesn’t believe when he finds himself in a quiet moment, is the rugged individualist, oblivious to any part of the world that he can’t personally instrumentalize.

But the sound of Donald Trump lying his way toward the Oval Office and the constant sight of the oil refinery looming behind Mikey as he rides a kids bike on dilapidated streets subtly emphasize that he doesn’t exist apart from the society he chooses not to acknowledge, but within it and as a product of it. As he bulldozes the fragile and imperfect small-town community of Red Rocket, his forceful, American-hustler charm increasingly grates on the people he won’t acknowledge he relies on. If what seems to be the comic irreverence of Baker’s film, from its title to its use of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” as a recurring motif, actually constitutes a kind of despair about American society, in the end it’s accompanied by the hope that people might be able to band together and kick the Mikeys of the world the hell out.