In the past few years, Sean Baker has quickly emerged as one of America’s foremost auteur filmmakers, both in the kinds of stories he puts onscreen and in the artistic processes he’s created to go about telling them. With previous films including Starlet, the iPhone-photographed Tangerine, and Oscar-nominated The Florida Project, Baker’s work explores underseen communities existing on the fringes of society, often subjected to the political and economic hardships found in contemporary American life. By casting many first-time actors – locals often found in the areas he is exploring by methods as unconventional as hiring someone found on Instagram or while shopping in a local Target – Baker’s work is always grounded in a sense of raw naturalism that borders the line between documentary and narrative filmmaking. His characters and their experiences are manufactured, but they’re rooted in real circumstances and genuine struggles as unveiled through a comprehensive research period that often includes a full immersion into these communities and a writing process in collaboration with their residents. As a result, Baker’s films have a tremendous sense of place and an objective honesty, yet respect for the people who live there.
Shot on vibrant 16mm film, Baker’s latest project, Red Rocket is a natural progression in his filmography as both his most audaciously provocative work yet and the film sure to earn him the most polarizing reception of his career thus far. The film is anchored by a career performance from Simon Rex as, “suitcase pimp,” Mikey Saber. Rex plays fast and loose, charismatic yet conniving, with a hidden brokenness that subtlety shines through his faded smile. We meet Mikey at his unwelcomed homecoming to a small Texas industrial town as he begs his way back into the life of his ex-wife, Lexi (NYC stage actress Bree Elrod), and her aging mother, Lil (Texas City first-timer Brenda Deiss), having hit rock bottom after burning every bridge of a 15-year career as a porn star in Los Angeles. With no car and no cash, Mikey spends his first days riding a borrowed red bicycle to pursue employment to pay off his promised portion of the rent bill, but fails due to his lack of professional work experience and flippant attitude towards entry-level positions. Seeking pleasure at every turn, Mikey begins to con numerous members of Texas City, including one neighbor who he hitches car rides from and another who he starts pushing drugs for. Now able to exceed Lexi’s expectations by paying more of the rent than initially promised, their old fling resurfaces and everything seems to be on the upswing. “Are you in?” Lil asks Mikey to give an ultimatum of commitment in one of the film’s strongest scenes. He says yes.
Now a restored family, the trio goes to a nearby “Donut Hole” where Mikey encourages them to order as much as they want as he flaunts his ability to cover the bill. Working the register is a young, freckled-faced redhead nicknamed Strawberry (first-time actress Suzanna Son), to whom Mikey takes an immediate liking. Their relationship starts to blossom, Strawberry being just as interested in the man twice her age as Mikey is in the barely legal “almost eighteen” year-old. Mikey approaches the relationship with a boyish delight, taking Strawberry on roller coaster rides and to strip clubs. Hiding the relationship from Lexi, Mikey attempts to encourage Strawberry into running away with him to LA to pursue a career together in the adult film industry.
Sean Baker’s films are successful because even as they portray characters who are morally grey or might make different choices from our own, there’s still a goodness somewhere underneath the rougher exterior of his characters. However, Red Rocket feels like the ugliest of the bunch, if only because there isn’t that same goodness to be found in Simon Rex’s Mikey. The deep love within the central relationships of his previous films translates here to something that often feels antagonizing and even predatory in the grooming nature of Mikey’s relationship with Strawberry. This alone might be enough to turn some audiences away from the film, even though it portrays a difficult reality that has had a growing exposure across many different entertainment industries. Necessary for a film about sexual exploitation, Baker doesn’t shy away from showing this content in its entirety. While it never quite feels like the film crosses a line into gratuity, the context through which we view these acts still works hard to play tricks on our mind. This doesn’t necessarily make Red Rocket a worse film compared to Baker’s previous, as much as it makes this a much more uncomfortable one; the source of darkness coming from a character themself rather than exclusively the external obstacles of a community suffering some form of societal socioeconomic injustice.
This also doesn’t make Red Rocket a fully unenjoyable ride. In fact, it’s probably Sean Baker’s funniest film to date as he deliberately goes for several beats of comedy, even though it sometimes undermines the otherwise very naturalistic view of humanity he’s capturing. In this way, the film feels slightly more scripted than his early work that features a much greater percentage of situational improvisation on the part of the actors. Red Rocket is also missing the bravura finale that buttons most of Baker’s movies. Because we’ve already seen flaws on all different angles of Mikey’s morality, we don’t feel emotionally affected by the ultimate choice that he is left to make. Instead, we’re just left feeling uneasy about how this future moves forward. The film is often so focused on its past and revealing details of exposition as it goes, that it really lets the Strawberry plotline be the only choice that feels like a potential future. This sets up one of the central conflicts presented by the film: whether or not anything Mikey says or does is coming from a place of honest good, especially whether he truly loves Strawberry or if he’s just using her opportunistically as a ticket back to his former lifestyle of relative wealth and fame. This causes the film to feel like it’s meant to have no future as both readings of Mikey’s actions are ethically reprehensible in their own ways.
Red Rocket is unmistakably a film from auteur Sean Baker. It carries all of his stylistic tendencies from the casting of first-time actors, to his long establishing shots of small businesses while characters walk across the frame, to the themes of entrapment within a broken American dream. It features stylistic flairs such as the smoke of a joint transforming into a factory smokestack. It captures the turning point of a nation stuck in its ways and enlarged by one man’s conquests in Texas City, mirroring its devious alpha male protagonist to a rising figure fighting for the republican seat on the 2016 presidential ballot, a historical context recurrently shown on TVs in the background of this story. But as grounded in reality as Red Rocket ultimately feels, we’re still left with an unsatisfying notion that it should eventually take off.
