![]() Talking his way in the door to take a shower, Mikey swiftly puts down roots despite the objections of the two jaded women, who are like meth-head versions of the Edies in Grey Gardens. When he turns up unannounced at the run-down suburban home of his estranged wife and former porn co-star Lexi (the terrific Bree Elrod, the cast’s only other professional actor) and her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss, a hoot), both of them greet him with an unwelcoming “Oh, my shit.” Mikey apparently had promised he was never going to set foot in Texas again, and they were fine with that. When another character’s actions inadvertently cause disaster, Mikey goes on autopilot to extract himself from the situation and ensure he remains blameless, a skill he seems to have utilized many times before.īruised from a beating he claims he took from two homeless guys, he arrives back in Texas City after a two-day bus journey with nothing but the grubby tank top and jeans he’s wearing and $22 in his pocket. But he’s a narcissistic piece of work with no trace of redemption, seemingly learning nothing from each failure, humiliation and comeuppance. Mikey doesn’t entirely lack vulnerability and certainly not humor in Rex’s lively characterization. In Starlet, he riffed on a Harold and Maude-type connection between a porn actress and a lonely widow in her 80s Tangerine was driven by the scrappy solidarity of two transgender sex workers and The Florida Project captured the resilience and joy of a pair of 6-year-old girls living in the tawdry shadow of Walt Disney World, one of them subject to the whims of a trainwreck mother. While the director and his co-writer are equally nonjudgmental about Mikey, a sourness does creep in that’s likely to make the audience less forgiving.īaker’s films about women just have more heart. Not since Baker’s early features Four Letter Words, Take Out and Prince of Broadway has he focused on a male protagonist, and that choice alone engenders less warmth toward the screwup at the center of Red Rocket. ![]() In that latter area, Baker collaborates for the first time to great advantage with Drew Daniels, the talented cinematographer who shot Trey Edward Shults’ films, including the visually rhapsodic Waves. That makes Baker’s new film a tougher creature to love, even if many of the same virtues of his recent successes are on glorious display - notably shaping fully lived-in performances from a cast made up predominantly of non-actors, and finding shabby poetry in an enveloping milieu that ranges from sleepy through seedy. He’s part self-delusion and part calculated deceit. While Mikey is funny and even endearing for much of the movie with his shameless survival tactics and his compulsive lies, he’s also a wicked embodiment of the Trumpian ethos of conning people with big talk and empty promises, milking them for whatever he can get and then moving on with zero accountability. It’s no accident that Baker and his regular co-writer Chris Bergoch have set Red Rocket against the casually observed backdrop of the 2016 presidential primaries. Played by Simon Rex in a magnetic full-tilt performance of wired physicality and hyper-caffeinated loquacity, Mikey Saber, as he’s known professionally, is basically a charismatic douche, a user and a loser. Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)Ĭast: Simon Rex, Suzanna Son, Bree Elrod, Brenda Deiss, Ethan Darbone, Judy Hill, Brittney Rodriguez ![]() But Strawberry’s unlikely springboard to fame and riches is entirely secondary to the opportunity she represents to exploitative hustler Mikey, himself an adult film actor now past his expiration date and looking to transition into management. In this case, it yields not a glamorous movie star but a potential porn sensation in Lolita-like 17-year old cashier Raylee (incandescent newcomer Suzanna Son), known as “Strawberry” for her red hair. The Donut Hole in industrial Texas City on the Gulf Coast serves as the sleazy flipside of the malt shop where Lana Turner was legendarily discovered. An outlet specializing in those same nutrition-free snacks, clogging America’s arteries and rotting its teeth, again plays a central role in the director’s latest down-and-dirty underclass exploration, Red Rocket. The now-defunct Donut Time, a no-frills 24-hour eatery on the Hollywood intersection of Santa Monica and Highland, was a key convergence point for the low-end sex and drug trade operating in the area in Sean Baker’s 2015 breakout, the divinely empathetic transgender girlfriend movie Tangerine. ![]()
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