Red Rocket – A Gripping Slice Of Life Tale

Red Rocket sees Mikey Saber (Rex), a formerly successful but now nearly broke adult entertainer return to his small Texas hometown in the year 2016. After a change in his previous motivations, he is less concerned with gaining people’s favor and more bent on getting people to do what he wants. Crashing at his ex-wife Lexi’s (Elrod) house, he takes up selling weed to pay off rent and becomes smitten with teenager Strawberry (Son) who works at a local doughnut shop. It isn’t long before his scheming ways start to implode on him.

The best way to describe Sean Baker’s directing style is naturalistic. While that’s one of many words that gets thrown around quite a bit, it’s almost unsettling how much Red Rocket replicates a slice of life, in this case the life of a low-life no-good huckster. This film gives audiences a glimpse of the everyday struggles of working-class fools and marginalized folk, those who have been rendered desperate by the unforgiving world around him. But this is all anchored by Saber, who is easily one of the most detestable characters in recent cinema history. The question is, why are we so innately gripped by his escapades in this film?

A lot of that has to do with Rex – a former adult actor himself – who doesn’t try to give a sympathetic bent to Saber. He’s obnoxious and pathetic on the sweaty surface, but as the film went on, Rex gives audiences an invitation into his wretched soul, offering a window into the depths of his repulsiveness to offset the innately silly exterior. The way he barely emotes but does stare intensely into the few emotions he shows openly – desperation, jeer, anger, and calculation and dumbfoundedness. Rex slides seamlessly between Saber’s state of mind in such a slippery sense that fits his complete lack of integrity. The crux of his so called character arc comes in his relationship with Strawberry, in which his perception of their relationship is purely mercenary. He wants to groom her into his comeback trophy, but is struck when she seems to be out of his league. Rex doesn’t try to sugarcoat how gross his actions are, or how indifferent he is to Strawberry. This relationship is a pathway to make us realize how vile he is.

Beyond that, the way Saber carries himself in everyday life, from the way he rides his bike to the way he runs in the street naked, reinforces his huckster nature. His downfall feels satisfying because it makes sense in the larger context, everything he’s done to wrong everyone else comes back to bite him when the people he’s been dealing marijuana for confiscate his money, and he’s right back where he started – washed up, bruised, nearly penniless, and nothing he’s done has come in his favor. It doesn’t feel overly dour though, just a man getting his comeuppance.

In the end, the biggest virtue of Red Rocket is that it doesn’t need to be about anything bigger than it is – it captures a mood in time from just a few years back to where we are now, through the lens of someone who feels painfully real to that not-too-long-ago era.

still courtesy of A24

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Gabe Guarin

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