16 Feb 2022

Red Rocket

From At The Movies, 7:30 pm on 16 February 2022

Red Rocket is a new movie written and directed by Sean Baker in which Simon Rex plays a loser hoping to revive his shady movie career with the aid of a young girl called Strawberry.

American director Baker first came to many people’s attention with a film called Tangerine, shot entirely on a cell-phone. 

It was gripping. Baker’s road movie about two Hollywood trans prostitutes hunting down an ex-boyfriend really benefited from the intimacy of such a tiny crew.

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Photo: Screenshot

Baker seems to have a thing about outsiders.   

The follow up - the brilliant Florida Project with Willem Dafoe - centred on the 6-year-old daughter of another prostitute.  And his latest Red Rocket brings the action to hard-scrabble Texas.

Mikey Saber gets off the bus with nothing to his name but the clothes he’s standing up in and two black eyes.

He knocks at the door of his estranged wife Lexi, where she lives with her deadbeat mother Lil.

Mikey sweet-talks Lexi into putting him up – he can sleep on the couch in front of the TV – while he looks for work. That might take some time.

Mikey’s been living off the books now for years.  He ran away from Texas with Lexi and they ended up in Hollywood.  Not Tinseltown, Lala Land Hollywood - real Hollywood where you take whatever job is going. 

Which often means the porn industry.

Lexi lasted a couple of years in the “Adult Film Business” before she quit it – and Mikey - and went home.    

Mikey lasted longer but got into trouble with too many people – hence the black eyes and the trip back home.  

So next he has to find paying work, and the only people hiring aren’t exactly legal. 

But beggars can’t be choosers, so Mikey sets off down the Primrose Path on a borrowed girl’s bike, but always keeping an eye out for opportunity.

Having got this far – and I haven’t even mentioned young Strawberry who’s got trouble written all over her – I suspect some of you are wondering “Why should I care what happens to these unsavoury people?”  

There are two answers to that question.  The first is writer/director Baker.

Baker has a gift – one you don’t learn in courses on “How to make movies that sell”.

He knows how to make us interested in his characters and - even rarer - to like people who on the surface are totally unlikeable.

The other secret weapon of Red Rocket is star Rex. After years trawling the underworld of Z-grade independent movies, Rex takes hold of the character of Mikey Saber and runs with it.

Even a loser can get lucky sometimes, thinks Mikey when he runs into Strawberry.

Strawberry may be young but she’s not naïve. She sees Mikey as her ticket out of Texas, while Mikey sees Strawberry as his way back into fame and fortune.  

But anyone looking at this modern Bonnie and Clyde would be unwise to bet on their prospects.

Red Rocket is tellingly set in 2016. While Lexi and her mother watch their reality shows and Judge Judy knock-offs, sharing the TV screens is the campaigning Donald Trump.  

TV rubbish, low-rent smut, modern politics….  What’s the difference, asks Baker?

Ironically or not, it takes a brilliant low-budget movie like Red Rocket to connect those dots more effectively than films with fifty times its budget.

It’s one of those films that you luck into, rather than plan to see, maybe. But right now it’s one of the best things around.

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