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 hi...