The film is best viewed as a tricky character study, one about the undulations and relentless demands of self-worth-and, of course, of money, which is always a focus of Baker’s films. But I don’t think Baker is really trying to be that sweeping. Red Rocket might be about the consuming American machine, which spits out its waste as it consumes other lives. ![]() ![]() Is something bigger about America being said here, hinted at in all the TV news snippets about the impending 2016 election heard in the background? Maybe. But that is typically Baker’s m.o., to present lives in the margins in all their ambivalent dimension. That’s a grim subject for a film as bright and fun as Red Rocket often is. Rex, darting and shiny-eyed and ever-moving, potently communicates the menace of Mikey’s presence, perhaps only visible to us at a considered distance. These portions of Red Rocket unnervingly depict a kind of grooming, a procedural wearing down of norms and inhibitions that, in Mikey’s case, comes with a derring-do smile. He finds it in the form of a teenage girl named Strawberry ( Suzanna Son, making an auspicious film debut), who works at a donut shop and is immediately taken by this solicitous storm blown in from another coast. Rex deftly calibrates this portrait of a regular guy gone rotten with self-interest, a man who once traded on his good looks (and still does to some extent) searching for his next angle. Manipulation comes naturally to him, so naturally that he might actually be a sociopath. And it can’t go unnoticed how hollow Mikey’s friendliness actually is he’s using everyone around him, climbing over them to get back to his salad days of AVN awards and Hollywood homes. Mikey is cluelessly vain, an unending braggart ever monologuing about past porn-world glories. Red Rocket is yet another example of Baker’s keen handling of actors, professionals and not.īut as the film unfolds, we begin to see something sinister in there, too. He and Baker make staccato music together, as Mikey’s profile shifts from hangdog loser to something far more complicated. Rex’s performance is fleet and nimble, gregarious and shaded in darkness. ![]() Which is all to say, Baker’s choice is a rather perfect one-in contextual terms and actual ones, too. Like Mikey, Rex’s heyday was around 25 years ago too his legacy has largely been reduced to “remember that guy?” snickers and a sort of conspiratorial knowledge shared by many gay men in their 30s and 40s who intimately knew Rex’s earlier work. Penniless and, it would seem, homeless, he returns to his native Gulf Coast Texas, ready to start a starry-eyed scramble all over again.īaker made a fascinating choice when casting Mikey: the MTV VJ turned actor turned rapper Simon Rex, who also did some (solo) porn as he was getting started as a model. ![]() It’s simply time that got him, his work drying up after 20 years in the business. Unlike Dirk, Mikey hasn’t been derailed by drugs and the advent of home video. If Dirk Diggler, the hustling and hustled porn star from 1997’s Boogie Nights, were to find himself in 2016, he might look something like Mikey Saber-the bedraggled adult film star who occupies the frenzied center of Sean Baker’s latest film, Red Rocket.
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