Red Rocket (2021)
dir. Sean Baker
Rated: R
image: ©2021 A24
Child Grooming is a fitting alternate title for Red Rocket. In at least one interview piece focused on Sean Baker’s new film, the director is described as “playing with fire” when it comes to the subject matter of the movie. In 2017, Baker directed my number one film of the year, The Florida Project. I praised that movie for practicing radical empathy. In my description of The Florida Project for my top ten list of that year, I stressed that “we have a duty to look after each other. And yes, even when we don't agree with someone's life choices. Yes, even when we think they don't deserve it. No one deserves to live on the fringes of our society because they don't have enough of the only thing we seem to care about: money.”
Baker and his frequent writing partner, Chris Bergoch, test the limits of the radical empathy I singled out in my praise for The Florida Project. It’s like Baker wanted to know if I, personally, would grant the same empathy to an abuser, someone who will use anyone to get what he wants. Baker does it for laughs in a movie that focuses on a 40-something-year-old man harnessing every ounce of his charm to convince a 17-year-old girl to run away with him so they can make a fortune together in porn.
I struggled mightily with Red Rocket as I screened it and am still struggling with it as I sit here writing this. (If nothing else, Baker’s movie is a potent example of why I find what I’ve been doing with this website for the better part of a decade so challenging and rewarding.)
Baker’s Red Rocket plays with fire, and you can make the argument that the character who gets burned is the one who deserves it. Baker’s choice to center an irredeemable abuser in Red Rocket left me queasy. You can argue that the movie gives that character exactly what he deserves in its final minutes. But for the almost two hours that precede the ending, Baker shows him thriving as his most authentic self; a key part of that is taking advantage of people who don’t know any better.
Mikey Saber is a down-on-his-luck former porn star. When we meet him, he’s at the end of a one-way bus trip from LA back to his hometown, Texas City, Texas. The black eye and bruises he’s sporting tell us he’s escaping something. We never find out exactly what, but we’ll learn over the course of the picture that he’s an expert at giving people a reason to want to kick his ass.
Desperate and with nowhere else to go, Mikey begs – or, rather, cajoles – his estranged wife, Lexi, and her mother, Lil, to let him crash at their house until he can get back on his feet. It’s amusing to see Mikey’s slipshod con game work it’s magic on the circumspect Lexi and Lil in the first reel.
We’ve all known someone like Mikey, endlessly working the angles with his non-stop chatter in a relentless assault to convince you to give him what he wants. And we all know where someone like Mikey will end up. It’s in their nature to get into situations they can’t possibly talk their way out of.
So, I was happily along for the ride for the first 20 minutes or so of Red Rocket. Aside from Mikey’s simultaneously amusing and infuriating behavior, Baker and Bergoch explore, briefly, the stigma that comes with being a sex worker.
Mikey really does try to find a job. The film employs a montage to show the character going on half-a-dozen or so interviews. They all end in disaster when he has to admit that the reason there’s a lengthy gap on his resume is because he’s spent the last two decades making porn for a living.
Much like certain brilliantly crafted sequences in The Florida Project, Baker fuses comedy and pathos to produce empathy for his main character. Mikey’s constant flimflamming in the interview sequences is exhausting, but you have to admire the guy for trying. Because Baker has set Mikey up as our hero, I was rooting for him early on. When he has to resort to selling weed for a local dealer so he can pay Lil some rent money, I focused not on his bad decision, but on the cruelty of a society that forces someone like Mikey into making it.
Then Mikey meets Strawberry, a 17-year-old who works at The Donut Hole. (Baker must have chuckled heartily when he found the restaurant.) Everybody calls the girl Strawberry because of her fiery red hair. Mikey instantly begins salivating over her. For a while, I wasn’t sure if it was because he simply wanted to fuck her or because he wanted to turn her out and make her a porn star. Unlike Mikey, I was thinking too small. Mikey goes for both because he is, as his wife calls him late in the film, a suitcase pimp. That’s a man who lives high on the hog from the earnings of women in porn who he “manages.”
I want to be very careful here. I even wrote in my notes as I was screening Red Rocket that it was imperative that I not infantilize Strawberry. Baker and the actress who portrays the character, newcomer Suzanna Son, both give Strawberry agency; at least as much agency as anyone living in the depressed economic circumstances of her hometown can have.
Baker, who has cited Italian eroticism and sexploitation films of the 1970s as his inspiration for Red Rocket, luxuriates in Mikey’s single-minded carnal obsession with Strawberry. That’s what makes it so disgusting. There are plenty of women – I found a few while scanning reactions to Red Rocket on Letterboxd – who know exactly why the majority of critics, who are overwhelmingly straight men, have been rapturous in their praise of Baker’s film.
Strawberry does have agency – as my wife reminded me after the movie was over, sometimes 17-year-old girls want to fuck older men, and there’s nothing wrong with that. She never does anything in the movie that she doesn’t want to do. Mikey’s relentless predatory behavior, though, and the fact that Baker centers him instead of Strawberry, made me sour on Red Rocket long before it was over.
It’s even more troubling that Baker cast the 26-year-old Suzanna Son to play the 17-year-old Strawberry. In a world ruled by patriarchy, where it’s common practice to make young girls look like grown women so that they are more easily sexualized, Baker stops commenting on society and instead, he revels in it.
There’s also a half-assed thematic element in that the movie takes place during the 2016 presidential campaign. Almost as a constant drone, we hear Trump and Clinton on TVs in the debates – never mind the fact that the people who the movie focuses on are probably among the least likely to be politically engaged – and we see Trump billboards all over the tiny Texas town.
I suppose Baker is trying to juxtapose the two narcissists, Mikey Saber and Donald J. Trump. In a world where one of those narcissists actually ascended to the highest office in the land and continues his efforts to destroy US democracy, I needed something a little more incisive than what Baker has on offer here.
No matter what my reaction to the subject matter, it’s hard to deny the brilliant performances throughout Red Rocket, especially the singular work of Simon Rex as Mikey. Rex, one of the only professional actors in the cast, got his start making solo masturbation videos for a gay porn company before moving on to become an MTV VJ, actor, and rapper. Rex imbues Mikey with a conman’s relentlessness and smooth-talking. He’s compulsively watchable, even when what his character is doing is utterly disgusting.
Suzanna Son is likewise hypnotic as Strawberry. After I emotionally detached from the movie’s nominal hero, what kept me going was rooting for Strawberry to ditch both the creep who’s desperate to make money off of her body and the town she’s stuck in. Son has the effervescence and screen presence to pull off being a shadow protagonist. As is Baker’s habit, he fills out the rest of his cast with non-professional actors, giving Red Rocket a gritty feel that matches the set design and Drew Daniels’s washed-out cinematography.
In the past decade or so, people who love art have been wrestling with the idea of art that hasn’t aged well. It’s easy to look in hindsight at jokes or plot points that punch down or show the contemporaneous culture to be cruel or harmful. With Red Rocket, I had a similar reaction, but looking forward instead of backward. I’d bet money that in 30 years, people who haven’t been born yet will look at Red Rocket and think, “What were they thinking?”
Why it got 1 star:
- I couldn’t get past the ick factor of child grooming that is Red Rocket’s focus. There are some funny moments, like the full-frontal shot of Mikey as he walks into the living room of his new abode, right in front of his mother-in-law. As funny as the movie can be, though, those moments clash catastrophically with the overall tone and subject matter.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- My hopes for Red Rocket were raised even higher with that opening sequence using NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye. It’s a masterful use of music to set a mood.
- Some might call it poverty porn, but Baker is working in what I would consider American Neorealism, modeled after Italian Neorealism, a subgenre that blossomed after WWII, in which the filmmakers focused on the plight of the downtrodden.
- The “stolen valor” segment of the movie, wherein an acquaintance of Mikey gets caught pretending to be a veteran to make money selling American flag pins, doesn’t really add much to the story. I’m guessing Baker is commenting on capitalism, but it was too muddled for me to get much out of it.
- I never even got to the explosive third-act plot development in my review. It shocked the hell out of me, but I guess it paled in comparison in my mind to the child grooming.
- The poster for the movie is amazing. It screams classic 80s sex comedy. I wish Baker had made a movie to match.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
I saw this via an awards season screener disc in my home theater. Red Rocket is currently in limited theatrical release.