Movie Review: ‘Red Rocket’ Explores Charming but Horrible Rogues

Sean 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.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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Sean 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.