Red Rocket review: Grifters and porn stars collide in a hectic, Trump-era cautionary tale

Dir: Sean Baker. Starring: Simon Rex, Bree Elrod, Suzanna Son, Brenda Deiss, Judy Hill, Brittney Rodriguez, Ethan Darbone, Shih-Ching Tsou. Cert 18, 131 minutes

Grifters come in many guises. But they all love to talk. The voice of porn star Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) ricochets around the frames of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket like a pyrotechnics show. Arriving back home in Texas after years in Los Angeles, Mikey rolls up to the house of his estranged wife – Bree Elrod’s Lexi – with bruises all over his body and nothing in his possession except the clothes on his back. But he talks his way into a spot on Lexi’s couch, just as – it’s implied – he once talked her into the porn industry many years before.

Mikey also talks his way into the car of the lapdog next door, Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), who’s enthralled by all his stories. And when, at the local donut shop, he meets a girl (Suzanna Son) two weeks shy of 18 and named Strawberry, he talks and talks about how she’ll be his meal ticket back to Los Angeles and the good graces of adult film.

There’s another voice that rattles on during Red Rocket – that of Donald Trump. The film takes place in the middle of the 2016 election, and we often hear presidential debates playing out on TV. Baker isn’t exactly making a subtle allusion here. But his most recent features – Starlet, Tangerine, and The Florida Project – have all been hectic, sometimes funny and deeply empathetic stories about women in sex work, all of whom are resiliently holding on to their humanity in a world built to rob them of it. It’s as if, in the making of Red Rocket, Baker decided to swing his camera in the opposite direction. Now he’s taking a good, long look at the scumbag men his heroines are always trying to break free from. Perhaps that felt necessary at a time when one of those scumbag men was yapping away in the White House. When everyone in Mikey’s vicinity finally grows sick of him, we’re given a scene of about six characters all repeatedly screaming for him to shut up. It’s very satisfying to watch.

Baker’s not-so-subtle political allusion becomes a lot richer once you frame the film as a cautionary tale. Mikey’s desperation is a little pathetic: he rides around town on a bike that’s way too small for him, and has a tantrum when Lexi’s mother (the late Brenda Deiss) asks him to do the dishes. At his lowest moments, *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” kicks in, to pitch-perfect comic effect. But buffoons are all the more dangerous because they can catch us off our guard.

Rex runs full speed into the role like he has something to prove – and clearly, it worked, since he just picked up the Best Actor award at last weekend’s Independent Spirit Awards. Rex is a familiar if not immediately placeable celebrity. You might know him from his various TV appearances, or the Scary Movie franchise. Perhaps you know him as a model, a rapper, or an MTV presenter. He also briefly worked in porn.

Rex actively underplays Mikey’s self-interest and cruelty, so that – in a way – the audience becomes an equal target of his manipulation. When he’s grooming Strawberry and trying to push her into sex work, he talks about her like he’s a man in the throes of first love. Baker includes two, separate lines where characters casually point out the locations of Texas’s bloodied history – out there are the Texas Killing Fields, where 30 bodies, mostly of women and young girls, were found in the early Seventies. Over there is a former slave-trade outpost. Mikey barely registers what’s being said. And why would he? He’s the kind of guy who just barges forward, never once looking back to see who he’s trampled on.