Red Rocket Review: the ultimate hangout with the ultimate dirtbag

When Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) arrives in Texas in the early stages of Texas Red missile, he is ordered to leave immediately. “You said you wouldn’t set foot in Texas again!” His estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) yells at him from across her front yard after getting Mikey to leave her property.

“And then the world fucked me!” Mikey yells back. He really thinks so. For the next two hours, Mikey Saber will speak incessantly and breathlessly about his vision of the world. He sees every misfortune as someone else’s fault, while every setback is just another chance for him to emerge victorious, even if he never does. He’s a carnival screamer without a big top and doesn’t really need it. He’s effortlessly charming and shabby to the core. In a few minutes he persuades his wife and her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss) to let him crash on their couch. And then, for the next few weeks, he makes them wish they hadn’t.

The latest film from director Sean Baker (tangerine, The Florida Project), Red missile is a movie about a guy you probably know. Maybe not in person, but chances are you’ve met a Mikey Saber, maybe at work or more on TV. On the one hand, he’s damn relatable: he just wanted to flee the oil refining town where he grew up. For a while he did. Only it didn’t work out, and now he’s forced to return to Texas City, where no one really wants him and the few who don’t know him find out why everyone else thinks that way.

Saber comes across as personable at first. He’s a former porn star, and while he’s proud of his previous accomplishments (he keeps mentioning he’s a three-time award winner), they also make it difficult to get non-porn work. So he tries to convince Leondria (Judy Hill), a drug trafficker, that he can sell her weed like he did when he was a teenager. He rides the now grown-up boy next door, Lonnie (Ethan Darbone). Ultimately, he tries to work every possible nook and cranny, not just so he can leave, but also to get back to Los Angeles, where he feels a part.

Soon Mikey idealized those dreams into Strawberry (Suzanna Son), a teenage girl who works in a local donut shop. Immediately tied up, he spends all of his time with Strawberry, each fooling the other into believing that they will be their escape route from Texas City. Mikey’s madness takes a somber turn, however, when he begins to see Strawberry as his ticket back into the adult industry, and he’s slowly beginning to get her to embrace his suggestions.

Red missileThe script from Baker and longtime co-writer Chris Bergoch keeps things relaxed and focuses on Mikey’s incessant talking. His strengths, however, lie in the things that happen around Mikey, from the people who say little compared to him, who will stay in Texas City whether he does or not, to the vast expanses of the southern country where the only landmarks are chimneys and billboards of the Trump campaign. Against the backdrop of Mikey’s Hucksterism, the 2016 presidential campaign is on television, never commented on, but omnipresent. It’s another story about a man who effortlessly spun fictions about himself and made people believe them, to the detriment of everyone around him.

Simon Rex’s performance as Mikey sweeps everything around him, including the movie’s audience. The actor gives the guy a tireless energy, and Red missile a bit of a real parallel – rex was firmly established in the early party scene, a member of a class of tabloids best known for being famous (He also starred in most of the Scary movie Films). He is the metatextual anchor for Red missile‘s cast of talented strangers and non-actors, which continues Baker’s penchant for casting locals to tell local stories. Any Texas City resident is interesting enough to follow suit Red missile follows Mikey. Every scene he shares with them is steeped in hilarious disbelief as everyone grows increasingly skeptical of Mikey’s bullshit. As Strawberry, Suzanna Son takes on the movie’s toughest job, treading the line between the clueless naivety of a 17 year old and her selfish ambitions, while portrayed through the movie’s subjective lens of this older man’s ridiculous imagination.

Despite (or because of?) The dirt in the center, Red missile is a comedy. It’s the ultimate hangout film with the ultimate dirtbag and constantly provides evidence of what viewers with Mikey will suspect after just a few minutes: the man is pathetic. He can’t help but tell you, even if he thinks he’s talking himself up. Midway Red missile, Mikey gives a mundane speech in which we learn what he “won” his adult video awards for: oral sex scenes in which he was the recipient. Or in other words, as several characters point out – probably not much.

Mikey doesn’t think so, however. He never does. What are the chances, he says, that three different artists will win three years in a row where he is the only common denominator? The success of others is owed to him. His mistakes are always due to someone else. It is American political discourse in miniature, a matryoshka doll of finger pointing that depletes all the oxygen in the room as the cycles of exploitation go on unabated. When Red missileIf the story spanned several years instead of weeks, events would likely just repeat themselves, with Strawberry yelling at Mikey instead of Lexi across her lawn. He would have new business partners who fooled him and more people who would have robbed him of the chance to shine. When it comes down to it, Mikey just loves fucking people and that has nothing to do with sex.

Red missile currently plays in theaters.