Mark Reviews Movies: RED ROCKET

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 9, 2021

Mikey (Simon Rex) probably isn't the scummiest scumbag out there, although, to be fair his competition, we can only guess the full extent of just how scummy he has been up until this point. He's not talking—or, at least, Mikey clearly isn't being completely or even remotely honest about the nearly two decades' worth of bad decisions, betrayals, schemes, scams, and everything else he probably made and did to bring him back to the place he swore to which he'd never return. What we see of him, his motives, and his actions in Red Rocket gives us a pretty good idea of just how bad he almost certainly was.

There's a difficult trick attempted—and, ultimately, successfully accomplished to a significant degree—by co-writer/director Sean Baker here. This is a film that closely follows Mikey, a morally unappealing and consistently destructive guy, as he calculates and improvises his way into people's good-enough graces.

He acts as if he cares, but there's always an angle, known at the time or uncertain—although keeping a contact or a connection in his back pocket is always a good idea for some later opportunity or necessity. That angle always points back toward Mikey and forward toward his ultimate goal: to get out of this place, as he did once already 17 years ago, and return to his work as an adult movie star in Los Angeles.

Where does one even begin with this character, who is a terrible person—not because his ambitions, but because of how he exploits and steps over people to achieve them—throughout this movie, or this story, which simply observes Mikey as he navigates an ever-expanding minefield of his own creation? It's best, perhaps, simply to note that the film, as written by Baker and co-screenwriter Chris Bergoch, and the central performance are unapologetically, brutally, and uncomfortably honest about Mikey.

The filmmakers and Rex don't care if we like this guy, and indeed, the third act is filled with more than enough to ensure that we know the point is that we're not supposed to like Mikey. It does, though, want us to understand him, his intentions, and his specific brand of lying, cheating, and manipulating. We do, and that makes most of this story a queasily fascinating character study. Since we can see Baker and Bergoch setting up potential comeuppances for Mikey from multiple directions, it's also a very funny, if equally discomforting, comedy.

Mikey does arrive in his hometown of Texas City, Texas, at the start after a days-long bus ride (The soundtrack amusingly tells the guy to leave before he even gets there, via a peppy pop song). His first stop is to the home shared by Lexi (Bree Elrod) and her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss).

He just wants to stay the night, since he has nowhere else to go. Lexi tells him get off her property before she calls the cops. He complies, shouting at her from the road at the end of the yard, and through some subtly efficient editing, Baker shows how Mikey breaks down Lexi's defenses. From the street, suddenly Mikey is sitting right next to house with Lexi, working his convincing game, and then, he's in the house itself. It won't be a night or two he'll need, by the way, but more like a couple weeks, while he looks for a job to help out with the rent.

Yes, Mikey is, somehow, staying indefinitely. It'll be just like when he and Lexi were married, Mikey says. She points out that, technically, they still are married.

Aside from the domestic routines, which gradually have Mikey starting up some marital relations with Lexi (He doesn't want to sleep on the couch, after all), we watch as Mikey tries and fails to get a job (The interviews show the rhetorical tactician in him). He eventually starts selling marijuana, which is still illegal in Texas, for Leondria (Judy Hill), who wisely doesn't trust the guy but does eventually trust that he can sell her goods (Mikey hides the money, until, obviously, money becomes an issue for him to stick around the house).

Mikey gets rides to a nearby strip club and anywhere else he wants to go from Lexi's neighbor Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), the next-door kid, now an awkward and struggling young man, who looked up to his former babysitter and her boyfriend—especially after the couple ran off to L.A. to start working in pornography. Our scuzzy protagonist is a bit more honest about his feelings toward—although clearly not the truth of his history with—the industry and Lexi with Lonnie, and through those talks, we learn just how resentful he is about all the awful things that happened to him and that Lexi did to him.

It's never, ever—not once in any of the excuses and half-told stories of his troubles—his fault in any way. Poor Lonnie eventually learns that the hard way, in a sequence of events that solidifies—in case it isn't clear by then—how we're supposed to feel about Mikey.

The central relationship, though, is between Mikey and Strawberry (a great Suzanna Son, whose confident attitude covers up a naïve and wounded heart). She works at a local donut shop, and while Mikey seems smitten with the "legal as an eagle" (by Texas standards) 17-year-old, there's little chance his intentions with her are anything approaching romantic. Strawberry, he starts to believe, is his way back into the porn industry.

All of this, especially his connection to and manipulation of Strawberry, is icky and unsettling to various degrees, and that's the entire point. Rex's performance is particularly skillful in the way it both allows us to comprehend the machinations constantly moving in Mikey's mind and is, in that calculated and shallow way of Mikey's, charming enough to have worked at one point.

That it doesn't work or works to a much lesser degree serves as the clever center of the film's pointed comedy. That it works on people like Lonnie and Strawberry shows just how cruel and nasty the protagonist of Red Rocket could have been and still can be. The real joke, then, is in waiting for Mikey to get what's deservedly coming to him.

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