Mikey Saber is a cock of the walk in the LA porn business. Or was. After 17 years, he’s worn out his welcome in the skin trade and returned to his hometown of Texas City, Texas, on the dozy shore of Galveston Bay. Now in his 40s, Mikey has brought along a stock of the Viagra — “my little magic pills” — that had become a professional necessity back when he had a profession. What now?
Director Sean Baker’s last film, “The Florida Project” (2017), brought Willem Dafoe a best-supporting-actor Oscar nomination. But Baker — who also edited and co-wrote the new “Red Rocket” — achieves much of his filmmaking effect by casting non-actors, who bring a real-world tang to their performances. He has once again taken this tack in “Red Rocket,” although the star of the film, Simon Rex, has been a public presence for years, working as an actor, rapper, and, early on, a performer in pornographic masturbation videos. His madly overamped work in the role of motormouth Mikey Saber (not the character’s real name, of course), should win him a new level of esteem.
Mikey has returned home (by bus) in hopes of being taken in by his estranged wife, Lexi (a porn veteran herself) and her comically venomous mother Lil. Both women are openly hostile when Mikey unexpectedly comes knocking on their door. Lil (Brenda Deiss) remains that way; but Lexi (Bree Elrod) begins to wonder if Mikey might deserve a second chance.
Unfortunately, Mikey is the worst kind of fool — a bullshitter who has come to believe his own bullshit. Asked what happened to his once-golden porn career, he sees conspiracy everywhere. (“You know what?” he says at one point. “I been screwed out of ‘Male Performer of the Year’ literally five times.”) He keeps getting beaten up, for reasons unexplained. He decides he’s going to become a porn talent scout. (“I got my finger on the pulse of the next generation.”) Or maybe start teaching karate (“I just got my green belt.”)
To this end, Mikey decides to set a redheaded 17-year-old doughnut-shop girl called Strawberry (Suzanna Son) onto the lucrative career path of pornographic cinema. Here, director Baker has scored a creative coup. Suzanna Son vibrates with winsome comic energy; and when Mikey asks Strawberry to play something for him on a digital piano in her bedroom, and we hear how good she is, Baker makes it clear, without trying to deliver a trite message, that this girl is on the brink of throwing away her real talent for the soul-sucking rewards of the porn game. Like the 7-year-old Brooklynn Prince in Baker’s “The Florida Project,” Son seems to have been born into stardom. (Although the script here gives her a lot of help: “Who smokes joints anymore?” she asks Mikey. “That’s so old-man-y).”
The rest of the cast is also memorable, especially Brittany Rodriguez as an icy drug trade enforcer and Ethan Darbone as Mikey’s childhood friend Lonnie, who’s hypnotized by his old buddy’s endless sex-biz anecdotes. Lonnie may be a loser, but he’s a decent guy. Mikey is a loser, too, but nothing else.
Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
