“Red Rocket” calls for someone who can convincingly embody a bad actor, since audiences are meant to pick up on the calculating way Mikey tries to manipulate 17-year-old Raylee (Suzanna Son) into making a video with him. Maybe that’s deliberate, but it feels as if the director didn’t entirely trust Rex’s ability to play the subtext. The script, Baker’s fourth co-written with Chris Bergoch, can be a little obvious at times, inviting a kind of stilted stag-film performance style (most of the cast are amateurs anyway). But unlike that movie, the characters - including a backyard drug dealer named June (Brittney Rodriguez) and incel-next-door Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), Mikey’s one-man fan club - wear out their welcome rather quickly, while 2016 Trump campaign sound bites and trash-TV clips underscore the “reality” of this demented circus. After smooth-talking his way back under Lexi’s roof, Mikey discovers a promising contender easily enough at the Donut Hole (he also finds dozens of roughnecks willing to buy his weed, which seems to be the only way such an unemployable screw-up can earn some fast cash).Įverything in “Red Rocket” happens just a little too easily, which is one of the weaknesses of a self-indulgent regional satire that stretches its perhaps-80-minute plot over more than two hours: Like Baker’s beguiling “Florida Project,” it could have been tighter. In a place like Texas City - with a population of less than 50,000, living in the shadow of steaming oil refineries that popped up in the wake of a devastating industrial explosion back in 1947 - it’s not hard to imagine a pretty high school girl desperate to get out. Or maybe Mikey can find a new ingénue and talk her into following him out to SoCal. Maybe it’ll be Lexi (stage actor Bree Elrod), to whom he’s still married. “Suitcase Pimp” might have been more apt, since Mikey has essentially built his adult film career on “managing” the women he’s sleeping with, and the movie observes this fast-talking sleazeball coming home with a loose scheme to find someone who will be his ticket back into the porn industry. His movies not only grab people’s attention but have something profound and political to say once they’ve got it, and the same is certainly true of “Red Rocket” (the title of which is slang for a dog’s erection). But behind that impulse remains a sincere respect for such characters, elevating marginal or disreputable members of society the way Honoré de Balzac did. Baker seems to appreciate the way that making movies about porn stars, escorts and the like can scandalize and even electrify an audience. The subject matter may sound salacious, but in each of those projects, Baker revealed his soft core, so to speak: This nonjudgmental humanist genuinely cares about these characters, and while he doesn’t shy away from the illicit reality of their unconventional professions (the way “Pretty Women” did), neither does he gaze upon it with a lecherous eye (à la Ninja Thyberg’s 2020 Cannes selection “Pleasure”). trans fable) and “The Florida Project” (wherein a single mom turns tricks from her motel), and now this. “Red Rocket” marks the latest addition in what could reasonably be dubbed the director’s unofficial “sex-worker quadrilogy”: first “Starlet” (about the San Fernando Valley porn scene), then “Tangerine” (an effervescent L.A. Where other filmmakers still respect more puritanical codes, Baker shows an open interest in how the commodification of desire factors into modern life - specifically, how putting out can pay the bills and shift the power dynamic. 'The Story of My Wife' Review: Léa Seydoux Cannot Keep Pretty but Ponderous Period Piece Afloat Sean Baker’s “ Red Rocket” (the director’s first film to compete for the top prize at Cannes) is about an unlikely case of just such a runaway returning home and trying to rustle up some fresh opportunity there.Ĭannes' 2cool4school Showcases New Spanish TalentĬritics' Week Winners Revealed at Cannes 2021 There must be dozens, if not hundreds, of American indie films about young people escaping a dead end like Texas City and heading east or west, where opportunity lies. But that was roughly 20 years ago, and now, Mikey has fallen on hard times. They got married, moved to Los Angeles and made a decent living shooting porn together for a time. Adult film actor Mikey Davies, aka “Mikey Saber,” has five AVN Awards, and he creates opportunities to humble-brag about them constantly now that he’s back in Texas City, the tiny Gulf Coast town he and girlfriend Lexi left together shortly after high school. In showbiz, they have awards for everything - Oscars, Golden Globes and, of course, the Palme d’Or.
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