Red Rocket Movie Review: A Cruel Porn Star’s Journey Through America’s Sorrows

We get to see it, too, galloping majestically as he emerges naked from another scratch, plunging down an open road like a drug addict. Once, that organ was his ticket to eat, but now Mikey’s options are narrowing.

Sean Baker is one of the most distinctive voices in American independent cinema, a kind of X-rated Dickens whose audience is the marginalized, the oppressed, an ever-increasing number of people. excluded from the American dream.

In his 2015 movie Tangerinethat’s transgender sex workers in Los Angeles, in Florida Project (2017), he is the son of an unemployed stripper. And if so, the background to Red rocket even bleach.

As a bus pulled into Texas City, a toned but ragged man got off the bus. It’s Mikey (Simon Rex), in his cap, who walks through town, past ugly banks of oil refineries and petrochemical plants, to the dingy house where his ex-wife’s he is living.

Lexi (Bree Elrod) wants nothing to do with him, and her sly, smug mother, Lil (Brenda Deiss). But Mikey doesn’t give up and is oddly hard to resist: before you know it, he’s got his feet under the table and is planning his ‘showbiz’ comeback.

In showbiz we mean the porn industry, of which Mikey has been a legend for many years. His stage name is ‘Saber’, which leaves little to the imagination, and at various points Mikey would allude to his numerous wins at the porn Oscars. Now, however, he’s been running away from Los Angeles for reasons that have never been identified, easily imaginable.

As he searched for odd jobs around Texas, it was hard to explain the 17-year gap on his CV, so hard in fact that he had to tell potential employers: “Look for it. me online.” They were shocked to do so.

To make a living, he starts delivering grass to local drug lord Leondria (Judy Hill), but Mikey is still dreaming, and when he meets 17-year-old waitress Strawberry (Suzanna Son), he thinks he has become the king. next big star.

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Sadly, Mikey means porn star, but as Strawberry looks around the grotesque and polluted town she calls home, a career in sex simulation doesn’t sound so bad.

In Red rocketBaker interspersed the quirky cast with an amateur cast, just like Chloe Zhao did in Wandering. This is a very different film, however: a salty, careless, off-topic journey through America’s darkest corners.

Simon Rex is an MTV type actor, former VJ, and rapper who has appeared in Horror film Franchising. He’s also into porn and so is a perfect fit for Mikey, an absurdist and historical figure whose indomitable optimism is almost admirable. Almost, because of the self-centered Mikey, is incapable of handling the effect his turbulent lifestyle has on those around him.

For convenience, he started sleeping with his ex-wife, who seemed genuinely interested in him. But Lexi’s mother Lil was never fooled and threw him grimaces as they watched daytime TV together. In a town that hasn’t changed, hope is gone and the underclass of Texas City uses drugs, alcohol, sex, and television to make their lives sustainable.

No wonder Mikey is desperate to escape and he convinces himself that managing Strawberry could be the key to his revival. Suzanna Son, a young actress Baker encountered on the sidewalks of LA, is good at playing the beautiful waitress who craves experience, and begins a relationship with forty-year-old Mikey mostly out of boredom.

When they were at her house one day, she sat at the piano and sang a touching song written by herself: Strawberry has real talent, but of course Mikey doesn’t even realize it.

In Red rocketBaker describes a culture that lacks ideas and drains quickly, one that produces a creature like Mikey ‘Saber’ Davies, an empty vase with a very large schlong.

Rating: Four stars

Project Adam (Netflix, 106 minutes)