Simon Rex’s Mikey Saber is a twitchy creature, head held high, as if he’s rising above his own shit. He’s always craning around, always on the lookout. He moves like a meerkat and thinks like a snake, forever scheming. If he ever had an attention span, it’s long gone, along with his dignity and self-awareness. “Before long, it’ll be like we’re still married,” he says to ex-partner Lexi (Bree Elrod), who is very reluctantly allowing him to crash on her couch. “We are still married,” she glares. “Ooh, there’s a dragonfly!” he responds, staring out the window, instinctively ignoring her because her information is not what he’s looking for.
Mikey is, or was, a porn actor. They both were, but he stayed the course, making it big in Los Angeles until things fell apart. Now, with a pack of Viagra and a misplaced superiority complex, he’s fled back home to the city he hates, to maybe the only person left who’ll take him in. He thinks he’s a big shot, but no-one cares — to people here, he’s the same old scumbag he always was; most of them — mostly women — don’t even bother to disguise their disdain. Lexi reminds him he’d never set foot in the town again. “And then the world fucked me, what can I say?” he spits back.
Director Sean Baker loves prodding about in the remnants of The American Dream. Almost all of his films — certainly the last few, which include Starlet, Tangerine and The Florida Project — follow people mostly on the margins, who are stuck, shackled by circumstance, trying to get out, searching for escape, success, another life, another go-round. And to Mikey, everyone is a commodity. Everyone has been put on the planet for his benefit, to help him climb society’s ladder, trampling over them as he does so.
On paper, Mikey is repellent; on screen, compelling. Simon Rex makes him staggeringly charismatic.
Much action in Red Rocket, as it did Tangerine, occurs in a doughnut shop, where people flock for sugar and weed, and this one exists by a monstrous oil refinery. It is 2016: on television, Trump charms his audiences, telling them he has what they need. Meanwhile, Mikey gets into selling weed. “I’m a patriotic boy,” he tells the newsagent as he buys Stars and Stripes rolling papers. But is he? Most probably not. He doesn’t know what he is. Just what he wants. He certainly tells Raylee (Suzanna Son), who works in the doughnut shop and calls herself Strawberry, what she wants to hear, because he develops an immediate crush on her, and sees her as his ticket out of here — both despite and because of the fact that she’s 17. Maybe, he thinks, he can be reborn in porn as an agent.
On paper, Mikey is repellent; on screen, compelling. Simon Rex makes him staggeringly charismatic, even charming, providing one of the most watchable performances in, well, ever. We have to be drawn to him so we can understand how he reels in everybody else, and we are — he is endlessly captivating, fun and funny and ridiculous. Baker has a knack for incredible casting and he also surrounds Rex with people who feel like they’ve lived in their characters forever, despite the fact that most of them have never acted before. That’s Baker’s big magic trick, played out ingeniously here — fictional characters seem real; the film feels fly-on-the-wall, but is perfectly plotted. It’s supremely propulsive, much of the time seeming like it’s just hanging out with these people, but all the while seeding things in, building up relationships and resentments, setting the stage for drama.
Despite its lead character’s hollow heart, though, the film is an affectionate one. It’s shot on a lovingly grainy Super 16mm by cinematographer Drew Daniels, who made Trey Edward Shults’ Waves look so spectacular, and he makes Red Rocket as warm as the Texas sun. Here, Texas City is also an other-worldy place, almost sci-fi, the Donut Hole’s night-time neon glimmering in front of the oil refinery’s city of green and orange lights, while surrounding streetlamps flicker, the sky romantically awash with chimney smoke. Fantasy is in the air.
Texas City doesn’t revolve around Mikey Saber, but he thinks it does, blinded by delusion and desperation. Rex, Baker and his regular co-writer Chris Bergoch have created one of cinema’s truly singular characters. He’s someone you cannot and will not root for – yet you can’t take your eyes off him. By the time the film finishes, you don’t quite know what’s hit you. And then he’s gone.
