Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Rock Bottom: Film Review of Red Rocket
By Geoff Carter
★★★☆☆
There has been a tradition in American cinema–and narrative fiction–to romanticize the poor and unfortunate as noble and determined. The Grapes of Wrath, Sounder, Precious, and Slumdog Millionaire are examples of narratives that valorize the struggles of the lower class to fight for their rights—and their very survival—while maintaining their dignity. These are all good—and sometimes great—movies, but the picture they paint is sometimes naïve and idealistic. Yes, Ma and Tom Joad, Jamal Malik, and the Morgans are fine people, but in the cinematic universe of Sean Baker, they are hopelessly outdated anachronisms.
Baker’s films have centered on the desperately poor in society, but his people are anything but noble. In his disturbing film The Florida Project, single mother Hailey is a hustler moving from scam to scam and taking advantage of everyone she can—including her best friend. She has no aspirations for herself or her young daughter Moonie except to survive. In his film Tangerine, transgender sex worker Sin-De Rella juggles johns and friendships to maintain her hardscrabble existence. For all the grittiness and desperation in these lives—and the unlikability of some of his people, Baker still manages to garner sympathy for them. They are losers—not lovable losers, but believable.
I happened to run across Baker’s 2021 film Red Rocket on streaming television the other night. The film travels over some of this familiar ground, not in the back alleys of Hollywood or in the tattered outskirts of Orlando, but in the industrial wastelands of Texas. Mikey “Saber” Davies (Simon Rex) is coming home to Texas City after spending seventeen years as a porn star in Los Angeles. He gets off the bus and goes to his mother-in-law Lil’s (Brenda Deiss) and sweet talks (a relative term for Mikey) his wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) into letting him stay there until he gets settled.
Mikey applies for work at local stores, restaurants, and stores, but once he is forced to admit he spent the last seventeen years as a porn star, these opportunities shut down. Mikey is then forced to sell pot from Lil’s dealer friend Leondria (Judy Hill) and her tough-as-nails daughter June (Brittney Rodriguez).
Pedaling himself around the bleak landscape of Texas City on a borrowed bike and then wheedling his dweeby neighbor Lonnie (Ethan Darbone) into taking him to a local strip joint to sell his weed, Mikey starts cultivating new customers and makes a modest living selling drugs. Lexi begins to thaw towards him and eventually invites him back into her bed. Even his mother-in-law starts to be nice to him. Regaled with stories of his exploits as a porn star—and his long list of porn film awards—Lonnie sits in awe of him. Mikey finds himself on top of his sad little world built on bald lies and flimsily constructed delusions of greatness.
While taking Lil and Lexi out for doughnuts one night, he becomes smitten with seventeen-year-old clerk Raylee (Suzanna Son). He returns the next day and begins sweet talking the young girl, who turns out to be pretty far from innocent. Fueled with dreams of returning to the adult film industry, Mikey starts filling Strawberry with dreams of Hollywood, wealth, and glamor. Bored with her family, her boyfriend, and life in Texas City, Strawberry is enthralled with Mikey’s attention. Pretty, vivacious, and reckless, she follows Mikey to strip joints and starts seriously considering running away with him, failing to see through the pathetic and flimsily contstructed façade as an adult film industry mogul.
When Mike causes Lonnie to cause a horrendous interstate chain-reaction accident, Mikey does what comes naturally to him—he bails. Telling Lonnie not to say anything about him being in the car, Mikey hides as Lonnie is taken away, and—in the only instance of self-sacrifice in the film—takes the fall for the accident. Mikey, true to form, turns back to his own self-centered hustles. After he tells Lexi he’ll be leaving—and taking all the money—she and Lil decide to get vengeance on Mikey’s betrayals and bullshit.
Red Rocket is a bleak film, both emotionally and, in many ways, visually. The horizon of Texas City is dotted with smoking refinery towers dissected by rows and rows of cyclone fences. It is as flat and uninspiring as a cardboard cutout. The counterpoint to this barrenness is Baker’s use of saturated colors. The lawns seem almost artificially green—like Easter egg grass—and the bright pastels inside the doughnut shop where Strawberry works seems artificial, just as Mickey Saber’s dreams of a comeback are artificial. He is neither true to himself, his friends, his family, or to the teenage girl he is grooming to enter the porn industry. His dreams are as cheap and artificial as the pink frosting on a glazed doughnut. Even Strawberry’s home is a pastel wonder that looks as if it was lifted straight out of Edward Scissorhands.
While Red Rocket is a bleak film, it also contains dry doses of black humor. The acerbic relations between Mikey and Lexi and Lil are sometimes punctuated by moments of bullish affection. When Mikey treats the other two to a trip to the doughnut shop, their dialogue comes close to sidestepping their usual combative tone. They’re almost having fun. Almost. At times, Mikey is almost gracious, an instinct which is soon beaten down by his own self-centeredness.
Even though Mikey Saber and, to a lesser degree, Lexi, Lil, and her friends are not likable characters, they do have a gritty perseverance that earns some grudging admiration. Even Strawberry, for all her grasping opportunism, has an infectious enthusiasm. It’s hard not to like her—even when she’s enjoying a lap dance at the strip bar.
Mikey is a cheap hustler, but he is also an inveterate and chronic dreamer. Whether or not his dreams are cheap, tacky, tawdry, or immoral, they are still his dreams, and his determination to consummate them is admirable. Porn is Mickey Saber’s American Dream. Like many of Baker’s other inhabitants of this bleak landscape, these inhabitants of Texas City are only seeking their own version—their only possible version—of the American Dream. That’s all they have.
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