Red Rocket (Preview)
Reviewed by Jonathan Murray

Produced by Sean Baker, Alex Coco, Samantha Quan, and Shih-Ching Tsou; directed by Sean Baker; screenplay by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch; cinematography by Drew Daniels; edited by Sean Baker; production design and set decoration by Stephonik; makeup by Samantha Quan; costume supervision by Shih-Ching Tsou; music supervision by Matthew Hearon-Smith; starring Simon Rex, Suzanna Son, Bree Elrod, Brenda Deiss, Judy Hill, and Brittney Rodriguez. Blu-ray, color, 130 min., 2021. A Lionsgate Home Entertainment release.

The fetish of the money shot dominates Adult Cinema. Yet, despite its deliberate immersion in that cinematic culture and associated contemporary forms of sex work, what writer/director Sean Baker’s filmmaking typically privileges instead are images of moneyless people and places. It is adult cinema in another, markedly more valuable sense: profoundly interested in and insightful about aspects of modern-day American society and identity that less sympathetic or self-demanding artists exploit, moralize over, or ignore. Baker’s Red Rocket, the fourth entry in a superb quartet of sex work–themed features that started with Starlet (2012), followed by Tangerine (2015), and The Florida Project (2017), brims over with poverty and porn. The result, however, could not be further from Poverty Porn. Beautifully crafted and tonally audacious, Red Rocket articulates an analysis of post-Trump American masculinity and wider social mores as thoughtful and thought-provoking as anything else made in the disquieting years since The Donald’s unlooked-for rise to power. 

Late summer 2016: as Donald Trump secures the Republican Party nomination to become the next president of the United States, another big swinging dick struggles to make comparable headway in fulfilling his own version of the American Dream. Fortysomething Mikey (Simon Rex) washes up in his native Texas City, Texas, some two decades after leaving town to become a San Fernando Valley porn star. Penniless and possession-less, he begs for intergenerational female charity twice over, securing temporary shelter from his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), and her mother, Lil (Brenda Deiss), and freelance employment from mother-and-daughter drug dealers, Leondria (Judy Hill) and June (Brittney Rodriguez). Mikey, however, is a congenital hustler in both senses of the term. While adamantly assuring his skeptical benefactors of his good intentions and reliability, he secretly tries to groom an ostensibly naive seventeen-year-old local girl, Strawberry (Suzanna Son), to become a porn performer. Mikey convinces himself that this will enable an immediate and triumphant return to LA. As the narrative progresses, that dream of disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald’s theory about the structuring absence of second acts in American lives hangs increasingly in the balance.

Like Baker’s earlier work, Red Rocket forgoes autoerotic, knee-jerk moralizing. That doesn’t mean, though, that the film shies away from the fact that Mikey’s kind of American Dreamer is nearly always an American Schemer, too. For that reason, Red Rocket on one level plays out as a comedy of manners (or lack thereof) surrounding American heterosexual masculine identity and sexuality. Its tragicomic fable is one of a man whose hypermacho methods of pre-empting emasculation impel him ever closer to the fate that he most dreads. Indeed, the movie’s opening shot suggests that this process is well advanced even before the narrative starts: Mikey is asleep while not even at the wheel, dozing on the interstate bus that takes him home to Texas. Similar—but increasingly explicit because escalating—images of indignity then ejaculate themselves across the entire story arc. Mikey shaves with Lexi’s razor and wears her cast-off clothes; he is forced to ride a bike around the roads of a sprawling Southern state in which car is king; and, ultimately, he sprints the streets stark naked after being run out of town by the women whose trust he has abused. One of Red Rocket’s substantial narrative and tonal achievements, therefore, is to amuse even as it unsettles. The worse Mikey acts, the worse things turn out for him: he cuts a multifaceted, ambiguous figure rather than a one-dimensional antagonistic one as a result.

Red Rocket’s thematic ambition doesn’t stop there. It’s no accident that the climactic scene of Mikey running naked through the streets includes sharp pans down to his pitilessly exposed genitals and up to a pair of Texan state and American national flags hanging comparably limp in the background. Similarly, the opening scene of him arriving home on the bus pointedly foregrounds images of the huge oil refinery—arguably, the film’s final main character—that dominates the Texas City landscape. That gargantuan facility’s symbolic connotations are hyperphallic and hypercapitalistic: it is erectile and extractive on a near-unimaginable and geographically specific scale. What these bookending devices underscore is the extent to which Red Rocket is not content simply to function as a comic fable about the self-inflicted emasculation of a particular type of man. Rather, Baker’s film also looks to identify and explore the particular type of sociopolitical milieu that produces, and is then personified and further propagated by, a sorry figure like Mikey.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 3