Sean Baker’s Red Rocket asks why we keep falling for charming but horrible rogues.
Sean Baker’s Red Rocket asks why we keep falling for charming but horrible rogues.
S ean Baker might be the best American indie filmmaker you’ve (probably) never heard of. Working on such tight budgets that his features are essentially home movies — he not only wrote and directed his latest film, but also edited it, cast it, and did some “precision driving” for it — he mines the same territory as Paul Thomas Anderson and the Safdie Brothers, chronicling the poor decision-making of oddly endearing lowlifes in stories whose crazy twists are rendered with a documentary’s verisimilitude.
Unlike the other filmmakers I mentioned, Baker doesn’t hire big-name performers as stars, and I really wish he would, because that’s how you get audiences interested. People went to see Uncut Gems because they’d heard of Adam Sandler, not Josh & Benny Safdie. Nobody went to see The Florida Project, Baker’s brilliant and unsentimental 2017 film about poor people living in the shadow of Walt Disney World.
Baker is such an astute judge of talent, though, that his latest micro-budget film, Red Rocket, is likely to put its two leads on the fast track to fame. He builds his raunchy, offbeat, sometimes-alarming, and consistently very funny dark comedy around the considerable talents of a journeyman actor/deejay/rapper named Simon Rex. Rex, who manages to seem part puppy and part lizard, plays a porn actor named Mikey whose many mistakes have rendered him penniless and begging his estranged wife (Bree Elrod) and her mother (Brenda Deiss) to let him stay on their couch in his hometown, an oil-refinery burg on the Gulf called Texas City, Texas.
Mikey is a thoughtless, shameless, lying scoundrel, but he’s also funny, charismatic, endlessly entertaining, and surprisingly effective at getting what he wants. If he reminds you of anyone in particular, that is entirely Baker’s intent: In the opening minutes, Mikey passes under a MAGA billboard, and background sound effects from barely watched televisions that are always on in this white-trash milieu carry to our ears the back-and-forth of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Balance and subtlety tend to go out the window when it comes to commentary on Donald Trump, but Baker’s reflections are much more indirect, and consequently much more interesting. “It’s important to me not to just be preaching to the left,” he told Variety, disparaging filmmakers who “are not even talking to anyone else outside your echo chamber. I hope both sides can discuss and see and debate their politics within this story.”
I can’t imagine anyone walking away from the film thinking Baker is a Trump supporter, but the way he makes his points is so deft that some viewers might not even notice what he’s up to. Mikey is, like Trump, an all-American archetype: a hustler, a schemer, a boaster. The irrepressible energy and confidence he brings to every situation is so attractive that you can sense other characters are drawn to him even though they know it’s going to end badly, just because they want to see what happens.
Through force of personality, Mikey manages to reshape his reputation with both his doubtful missus and her crusty, chain-smoking mom (who is straight out of Hillbilly Elegy). Rendered unemployable in Texas City by his lack of experience doing anything except having sex with women on camera, he nevertheless finds a use for his charisma and becomes an innovative success in his new profession (weed sales). Then he sets his eyes on a 17-year-old doughnut-shop worker named Strawberry, who is played by Suzanna Son with such a potent blend of sauciness and innocence that she reminded me of Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show. As great as Rex is, Son steals scenes from him, one attention thief robbing the other.
Mikey has just about mastered all of the personality elements that he needs to shake off his past mistakes and become a solid citizen and dependable husband. Will he do any of that, though? Of course not. If he did, what fun would he be? In the early minutes of the film, he offers a long explanation of how he wound up broke and back where he started, and the tendency of things to go crazy in his presence is a notable recurring theme.
You’ve probably met someone like Mikey, especially if you’re familiar with the chaos-driven dynamics of white-trash culture. You can never believe anything such men tell you and yet it’s hard to dismiss them entirely from your life. Baker might just as well have titled the film, “Love the Way You Lie.”
