Not So Beautiful Loser

Red Rocket charts the course of a total loser as he returns to his hometown in Texas after getting the crap beaten out of him in LA.  Simon Rex plays the dude with meth-amphetamine gusto and a slick, sad toxic masculinity that gets inverted by the end of the show.  It's Simon's movie the whole way through; he is its center of attention, and also the soul-center of the universe each scene and flourish create.  A high-energy sad-sack with a predatory eye for just about everything, Simon's Mikey doesn't offer us a lot of redeeming value; he is not at all likeable, unless you like being constantly lied to, jerked around, and just plain messed with.  He is hilariously, stubbornly amoral, always on the trail of some kind of fix, but somehow Simon allows Mikey to shine when you need him to shine.  He finds a sort of aesthetic integrity in almost every low-rent desperate attempt Mikey makes not just to survive but to return to his glory as a porn star bragging about his Adult Video awards.  Simon mines innocence in stupidity and finds moments of bliss in the most tragic situations.  He should get an actual Oscar for this one.  His work is masterful and unrelenting.

As is Sean Baker's, the writer-director.  His last two films, Tangerine and The Florida Project, are so wonderfully frank and low-rent and gorgeous and heart-wrenching I was almost afraid this one would go sideways just because it seemed unlikely he could sustain his furious trajectory.  Sean does, big-time, with Red Rocket.  His eye for terrifyingly gorgeous 16-mm cinéma-vérité set-ups is at its peak here:  he gives us Port Arthur, Texas with heavenly straight-on precision:  decrepit domiciles and strip-clubs and a pink-and-brown donut shop, and so on so forth.  Red Rocket's setting, a coastal town that houses a huge petro-chemical refinery that glows in the night, is a major part of its genius.  Shots of Mikey riding his shitty little bike throughout the town have a hypnotic, nostalgic melancholy to them that foregrounds his eternal,  hard-luck boyishness.  That boyishness, though, does not mask Mikey's sociopathic tendencies; it somehow sharpens them into beams of sinister light flashing off his skin.

The plot is adroit and moves effortlessly from the initial reunion with Mikey and his ex Lexi and her mom Lil (Mikey begging for a place to stay) to Mikey returning to small-town drug-dealing to Mikey falling in lust with Strawberry, a teenaged girl who works at a donut-shop catty-corner to the refinery.  Bree Elrod plays Lexi with an exhausted energy that merges vulnerability with hard-earned meanness, and Suzanna Son plays Strawberry as a take on Lolita and Jennifer Jason-Leigh in Fast Times at Ridgemont High -- innocence and experience meshed into a yearning to escape anyway she can from where and who she is.

Sean fills Red Rocket with sunlight and shadow, sweetness and debauchery, kindness and boredom...  It truly is a movie that is way more than the sum of its parts.  Somehow, within the confines of a story about a shitty little nobody, he finds the ultimate archetype for our huckster/trickster age.  Throughout the movie, little bursts of 2016 break through:  Trump and Hillary speechifying at their conventions, other sound-bites nobody listens to but they are always on, a conveyor belt of divisiveness and shiny bull-shit, only pointing out that Mikey's hijinks are all accomplished in the shadow of bigger and even sadder ones.  God bless the USA.