In Red Rocket, Simon Rex plays a con man who’s mostly conning himself. Looking like Bradley Cooper if he’d gotten stuck in a tanning machine for 48 hours, Rex plays Mikey Saber, a porn star who washes back up in his small Texas town after an (offscreen, undetailed) run of misfortune in Los Angeles. A motormouth given to easy distraction, Mikey nonetheless talks his way into the ramshackle home of his former lover, Lexi (Bree Elrod), and her mother (Brenda Deiss), first for a much-needed shower, then for an extended stay—if he can scrounge up enough money to pay nominal rent. Is some sort of redemption, of the sort promised by Mikey, on the horizon? Or will old habits—and the allure of a 17-year-old donut-shop employee (Suzanna Son) whom Mikey believes has professional promise—keep his deluded dream of stardom alive? Co-written and directed by Sean Baker, Red Rocket never quite strikes the deep wells of empathy found in Tangerine and The Florida Project (at times the movie comes perilously close to feeling like a stunt), but as a character study it’s incisive and unsparing. Rex, meanwhile—an actor and former VJ with a brief early stint in adult entertainment—delivers an unequivocally great comic performance. Simultaneously sweet and icky, he gives the character a light, even gentle spirit that’s at odds with the materialist manner with which he thinks about and engages in sex. (My favorite throwaway moment might be when he gives Lexi and her mother a new ashtray; rather than throwing the used cigarettes from the old one in the garbage, he dumps them into the new tray as if they’re part of the gift.) Just when you think Red Rocket has run its course depicting Mikey’s obliviousness to his own lostness, Rex allows a glimmer of self-awareness to flicker into the performance, culminating in a final close-up that should be the envy of every actor, “legit” or not.
(12/1/2021)
