How much do you have to like a movie’s protagonist to like a movie? That’s a question that rattled around my head as I watched Red Rocket, a comedy drama from Sean Baker, the American indie king behind empathic gems Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017). In both those life-affirmingly humane masterpieces, Baker showcased marginalised characters whose lives were presented in rich, textured hues. However flawed they might have been, they were easy to engage with.
On its absurdist, slapstick surface, the antihero of Red Rocket is cut from similar cloth: an outsider with a survivor’s instinct and charisma to spare. Simon Rex is Mikey “Saber” Davies, a washed-up hustler who has been earning a living in the adult film industry in LA. Now it’s 2016 and he’s back in Texas City, bruised and banging on the door of his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), and her mum, Lil (the late Brenda Deiss – one of the film’s many screen first-timers). “Why are you here?” they ask, prompting a scattershot cavalcade of self-justifying tall tales, all of which leave Mikey broke and homeless. But not for long. With his trademark toxic cocktail of insufferable charm and relentless selfishness, he has soon moved back in, assuring Lexi that “it’ll be like we’re still married”, to which she caustically replies: “We are still married.”
