Sean Baker’s Red Rocket is a rare breed of cinematic animal, though, with the presence of both Bad Luck Banging and Pleasure on the horizon, it may simply be the inaugural installment of the newly revitalized Narrative Film About Pornography shock-adjacent subgenre by sheer happenstance. Like Baker’s other work, it exists on the margins of a small community full of big fishes, though unlike in, say, Tangerine or The Florida Project, it contains a fiendish perspective, a lead as morally compromised and hilariously depraved as the film’s heart is black. You know those Japanese companies that specialize in making the deepest black paints and inks in the whole wide world, the kind that, if you covered a room in them, your animal brain would start tripping out and you’d start seeing lizards and dead relatives and shit? Well, that’s this film’s approach to humor, beginning with the title — which may be a quadruple-entendre, if I did my counting right — and ending with its gut-busting mauling of N’Sync’s greatest hit, which may be forever associated with flopping genitalia mid-sprint in the minds of anyone under the age of 20 who views this in (hopefully) some distant year.
Like most of his projects, Baker’s filled out his cast with mostly unknowns and real off-the-street people from where he’s filming, but unlike in those films, a recognizable face bedrocks most of the action as the protagonist: That of Simon Rex, the MTV VJ, and comedian, who uses every ounce of his charisma and guile to bring Mikey Saber, washed-up porn star and general deadbeat, to life. After a lengthy falling out of the industry that, in his dubious telling, involved MS-13 and a whole bunch of drug-addled porn stars, he returns to Texas on the skint, begging his estranged wife (Bree Elrod) and her mother (Brenda Deiss), who absolutely hate him for what he put them through when their relationship collapsed years ago. Somehow, Mikey manages to smooth-talk his way back into their house and begins sleeping on their couch, while he schemes and plots to rebuild his life. He starts moving low-level weight for a drug dealer, who holds court in her backyard each day with an assortment of local folks and also begins hanging with the next-door neighbor, a Stolen Valor-ing doofus named Ronnie (Ethan Darbone), who just so conveniently has a car (he’s biking around on an ancient step-through, after all) and a hefty admiration for what Mikey was up to in L.A. in the same way that a kid might admire an older brother. For a moment — just a brief moment — it seems like Mikey might get his shit together and put down some roots, and maybe a full-on resumption of his relationship might be in the cards.
Yet all those plans are scuttled when notices the girl working behind the counter while he’s taking his hosts on a trip to the Donut store as thanks (and further-buttering-up) for housing him and feeding him and, you know, ensuring his survival. She’s a gorgeous young light redhead named Strawberry (Suzanna Son), who is equal parts charming and a little evil in that alluring way that gets the blood flowing to both heads on Mikey’s body. He doesn’t really care that she’s 17, he doesn’t care that she’s got a boyfriend, he doesn’t care if she graduates from fucking high school or not. Mikey just sees two things: a great lay, and, more importantly, his ticket back into the adult industry, should he be able to persuade her to actually leave Texas behind and head out to L.A. with him. And so begins Mikey’s longest con of all, attempting to juggle the responsibilities that he feels he still holds to his wife — upkeep around the house, occasional sex, a nurturing of her fantasy that they’ll get back together one day — while he courts Strawberry, hinting to her the riches that would wait in her future as he slowly breaks each chain in the line that connects her to her past in Texas. Of course, shit gets weird, and Mikey’s eventually forced to receive some manner of comeuppance for his actions, but the road there is as unexpected as it is hilarious to watch unfold.
I’ve probably said some variation of this over a thousand times at this point, but good lord is it unexpected that Simon Fucking Rex has given what might be the strongest performance by an actor in any film I’ve seen this year, and there have been some amazing ones. He radiates a kind of charismatic and sociopathic sleaze that pulls you in as much as his actions repel you, and it is so amazing to see Baker put him through these paces in this community, surrounded by all sorts of unstable elements. He is, of course, a fully-realized character: there are plenty of hints of sadness in his past, and someone on whatever L.A. edition of Storage Wars exists in that world will probably find a portrait of a well-rotted corpse with a nine-inch hog hanging around in some abandoned unit, but they’re all swallowed down, as he’s used to the bitterness at this point. He’s all id, chasing after that minute-to-minute high in service of his long con, so that his life might be an assemblage of them, and he doesn’t care what he wrecks in his path, provided he’s able to sweet-talk his way out of it (or at least have an open window to escape through). It is fearless and confident work, made even better by his pairing with Elrod and Deiss, whose glares and reactions give way to some amount of heartbreaking and soon-to-curdle hope, as well as Son, who will probably blow up from this (or at least get Drake in her digits).
Baker’s continuing stylistic drift towards more traditional modes of cinematography has fully paid off with Red Rocket, and if you thought that The Florida Project looked good, just wait until you see what images he’s captured to celluloid here. He has a documentarian’s eye for location and for naturalism, and there’s perhaps no one working in American cinema today who captures the kind of street-level decline within the American small town with as much vivid gusto as him, though, thank god, he’s much funnier than the Dardennes. That aesthetic crashes nicely against the sex-comedy vibes of the film, which, admittedly, never strays as far away from reality as you might think, especially now that most people know about the crazy shit that porn stars can get up to in the modern era (hell, just look at whatever Nacho Vidal did with poisoned frogs and stuff last year).
That said, it’s still incredibly funny — my first thoughts upon leaving the screening were “So, this is what it looks like when Sean Baker tries to one-up Jody Hill,” given that its closest cinematic antecedent may not be Boogie Nights but, instead, Observe and Report, which is endowed with a similar sense of decline and pathos — and the film’s third act is one of the best comeuppances that you’ll witness this year, though you perhaps shouldn’t expect Aristotle and company to be happy, given that it’s not total. They’ll be up in arms anyway, given this film’s depiction — not endorsement, obviously — of degeneracy, but Red Rocket is an essential cinematic experience, a vital piece of post-COVID cinema that will shock you until you laugh and get game. Or, at least, until you run out of the theater.