Gripping tale of toxic masculinity
Red Rocket 18 cert, 128 min ★★★★★
First, he cajoles his way inside the home, and bed, of his ultra-wary estranged wife
Dir Sean Baker
Starring Simon Rex, Bree Elrod, Brenda Deiss, Suzanna Son, Ethan Darbone, Brittney Rodriguez, Judy Hill
By Tim Robey
Sean Baker’s films – most recently Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017) – have fizzed fluorescently in corners of America we rarely get to inspect. His compassion for sex workers in both those pictures was open and unpatronising, the energy raucous, the colours searing.
Red Rocket, which shifts Baker’s gaze to the refinery-plant town of Texas City, appears to be promising a similar outlook. Fans of his work would be unlikely to object to that, until twigging that it has a totally different agenda tucked away in its back pocket. The discovery is quite a sting.
It’s set in the summer of 2016: soundbites of Trump gearing up for his battle with Hillary Clinton burble out from every TV. Historically, that was a good moment for men of blatant misogynistic turpitude getting away scot-free. It’s in that context that Mikey Saber, a beaten-up male porn star, crawls back to his home town from Los Angeles, to make a serious nuisance of himself.
First he cajoles his way inside the home, and bed, of his ultra-wary estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod, best in show), largely by promising that he’ll shape up, mow the lawn, and pay some rent to his mother-in-law (vivid, scraggly Brenda Deiss). All the while, he’s scheming behind their backs, after spotting a chirpy 17-year-old called Strawberry (Suzanna Son) behind the counter of a local Donut Hole.
Saber, who is played by Simon Rex, a 46-year old bit-part actor who made his own start in solo porn videos, sees in this adventurous teen a meal ticket back to the adult film world which has thrown him out on his ear. And so, any whisper of a redemptive arc in Mikey’s story gets drowned out by his grooming methods.
Baker knows how women are churned up to feed the narcissistic survival strategies of the world’s Mikeys, and how the porn industry is near-perfectly situated to make this all happen. Lexi, a part-time prostitute on Craigslist, is living proof, slumped in a deadbeat set-up where being treated to $6.32 of donuts counts as high rolling.
Admirers of Baker’s earlier work will have a journey to go on here; this study of a dirtbag running out of extra lives falls into the category of crowd-baiting, not crowd-pleasing. Then again, we can’t tell Baker to make the same film every time, or his explorations of gutter wildlife would get too cosy.
As red in tooth and claw as anything else you might find naturally occurring, Mikey’s particular brand of ruthless Trumpian individualism is hardly to be celebrated for a single day longer. What gives Red Rocket oomph is the horrible likelihood that he’ll carry on regardless.
In cinemas now