Red Rocket (2021)

I’m starting this review coming off a run of articles on The Athletic about the Golden State Warriors. One focused on the cost of the roster that just won the NBA Championship, but the other centered on their superstar, Steph Curry, who just took home his fourth championship but first Finals MVP award. A lethal shooter, Curry often gets described as a player with “gravity”; that is, his shooting ability draws defenders to him, pulling them away from teammates and leading to open shots for them. Steph’s gravity is emblematic of his immense skill and how he elevates the teammates around him.

 

Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) also has gravity in Red Rocket. With a fast-talking, rascally charm, Mikey disarms the people around him into missing both his narcissism and that his fingers are plucking bills from both their physical and emotional wallets during every sleazy word. Oozing cheap—but undeniably potent—charisma, he draws people toward him like Steph until they are right where he wants them, his face inches from theirs in an off-brand intimacy while his aw shucks smile hides that he is a cockroach underneath whose psychological persuasion leads them to grin as he calls out “Hold that door, friend!”, scurries inside, and begins wreaking havoc.

A former adult film star who dumped his small Texas hometown fifteen years prior, Mikey returns with a bruised face in 2016 and smooth talks his estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrond) and her mother (Brenda Deiss) into letting him crash with them. They resist at first—they know him—but slowly he burrows into their lives with some money here, some lawn mowing and sex there, until they are attached. 

Soon Mikey does the same with their neighbor, Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), who idolizes Mikey and becomes his chauffeur and hype man. When Mikey needs money, he starts selling weed for Leondria (Judy Hill) and her daughter June (Brittney Rodriguez) just like he did in high school, excelling by ignoring their explicit and reasoned instructions to the letter. They don’t trust Mikey at all—only the people of color in the film seem immune to any degree of his gravity—but even they indulge him because he is productive and it’s easier than waging a verbal war against a silver-tongued foe who will always win. 

The last one sucked violently into Hurricane Mikey is Strawberry (Suzanna Son), the not-quite-eighteen redhead who works the donut store counter. Immediately captivated, forty-something Mikey leans in, sandwiches a dumb joke between a compliment and a probing question, and slowly wraps her around his finger. He sees a future porn star in her and, as he tells Lonnie over and over, she’s in for it—she just doesn’t hasn’t agreed to it yet. Mikey says she’s in because he wants her to be in and, if he just refuses to stop talking, eventually he’ll find the button to get what he wants from her just like everyone else. 

At one point in the film, I asked myself out loud “Does he actually believe any of this bullshit?” Undeniably a ne’er-do-well and self-absorbed man, I began constructing a profile of a man deathly afraid of silence, so desperate for affection and security that he will do anything. The first to call others on their mistakes but Teflon against any incoming criticism, Mikey eventually convinced me of dual selves—one a cunning cockroach, the other a scared little fly trapped in the web of—

Wait. 

Yeah, no. I too caught myself falling victim to Mikey’s gravity.  Once I ordered myself to stop assuming his humanity and decency, I had to search for it, and all I found was not a lizard-brained feral shell of a person but a manipulative monster hunting down his prey with a dopey grin and ten dozen self-aggrandizing things to say, sharpening his gravity like a knife to abuse people in the same way Steph leverages his to demoralize defenders. 

I’ve gotten this far solely talking about the character and story, which says everything about the primacy of the casting here. Rex is Mikey and his performance is phenomenal, exuding the dangerously persuasive charm that sells the film but also flashing mortal fear when the occasion calls for it. Because Mikey’s entire spiel is itself an act, Rex is playing a character who is playing a role as well. The performance hums with perfect pitch. 

But the rest of the cast only enhances the performance by Rex. Populated by actors with short (to be generous) filmographies, Mikey stands out even more. It helps that the script from director Sean Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch makes those in Mikey’s orbit feel real; just like in The Florida Project, there’s a lived in, grimy realism to every person we encounter. Thin roles have depth: Lonnie, Lexi, Strawberry all have demons we get just enough of to understand them and empathize with them, which allows us to see snake charmer Mikey play his magic flute and lead them into the trail of destruction following in his wake. Known names in those roles couldn’t sell this the same way; amid the smoking oil derricks and unfenced yards of dying grass, Rex’s star shines even brighter, strengthening Mikey’s magnetism even more because of how unshowy everything on-screen is.

In a film almost perfectly realized, my one gripe is quite small. The film is set in summer 2016, a fact that we are reminded of by the TV in the background talking Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I knew going in that there was a connection between the former and Red Rocket, but the constant underlining in the film interrupted my immersion. A lesser film might have needed those arrows; a single instance at the end (instead of four or five throughout) would have sufficed here to draw a potent parallel. But that’s kind of it. Red Rocket meanders through its thoroughly lived-in world but even then it zips forward with an incredible inertia as powerful as Mikey’s selfishness. 

I’ll end this here. A few paragraphs back in my original draft, I referred to Mikey as a “man-child” while describing his behavior. It dawned on me later that, even in criticizing him with that term, I was again falling prey to him. Baker and Bergoch have created a character whose slimy irresistibility erodes objective analysis when left unchecked. Printed in text, Mikey’s words are unquestionably vile and repugnant; we’d react as June does while he narrates the “artistry” of his award-winning scene work. Absent his brash, disarming delivery and boyish grin while bicycling down the street, Mikey is an obvious predator, stalking victims with an unashamed ruthlessness. I’ll go further: he is a monster in the dangerous form of a calculating manipulator. We see this over and over again. Yet I instinctively called him a man-child; yet, while he watches Strawberry sing at her piano, full of youthful promise rips to be undone by him, I searched his face for regret or guilt or even a single shred of conflictedness. I am easily manipulated but still: how impressive is it to craft a film that aggressively and repeatedly underlines “this man is a willful menace” but still pull you into his shot even as you know to defend the pass. 

But that’s thing about remarkable gravity: no different than Steph’s ability to shoot and pass, once you’re in Mikey’s gravity, there are no winners. You’ve already lost.