Grackles review Red Rocket

Directed by Sean Baker

Reviewed by Madison Garber and Christopher Notarnicola

 Sean Baker continues his cinematic examination of the margins of American society in Red Rocket (2021), his follow-up film to The Florida Project, which brought Baker’s work to the mainstream in 2017. His latest film builds on his exploration of sex work in Tangerine (2015) and Starlet (2012), following Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), who returns to Texas City in disgrace after living it up in Los Angeles as an award-winning porn star for two decades. It takes more than a little charm and fast-talking to convince his estranged wife and former porn star Lexi (Bree Elrod) and her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss) to take him in. The condition: Mikey must earn his keep. At first he attempts to find honest work, but when his porn-laden resume fails to impress, he turns to weed dealing for Texas City local Leondria (Judy Hill) and her daughter June (Brittney Rodriguez). It’s then that Mikey sniffs out his second chance at stardom in the form of Strawberry (Suzanna Son), the near-eighteen-year-old donut shop worker he attempts to coax into the porn industry—his golden ticket back to LA.

Madison Garber: Baker has made a name for himself by bringing Italian neorealism to the oft-forgotten American fringes, capturing an authenticity that’s difficult to cultivate on Hollywood backlots or lookalike locales with seasoned actors. But what struck me while watching Red Rocket was the inextricability of Baker’s characters with his chosen locale. In the film’s opening, washed-up porn star Mikey Saber returns to Texas City, where oil refineries belch fire and smoke, looming like specters of honest work over his beaten body. Of course, in Baker’s film, “honest work” is relative, complicated. Leondria, Mikey’s weed supplier, tries to warn Mikey against selling to the “hard hats” that work for the refineries, capturing a tension between the negative political attitudes towards Big Oil and the relative financial stability that refineries provide to locals—work that stands in contrast to the weed-dealing and trick-turning realities of Mikey and his wife Lexi.

Texas City’s proximity to the Texas Killing Fields—the stretch of land along I-45 where the bodies of dozens of women have been found or gone missing since the early 70s—also lends an undercurrent of dread to Mikey’s already uncomfortable suitcase pimp scheme to lure seventeen-year-old Strawberry into a life of porn stardom. For all its gritty realism though, Red Rocket makes a move toward the fantastical in the film’s conclusion, a close (or maybe not so close) cousin to the imagined escape of Moonee in The Florida Project into the technicolor wonderland of Disney’s Magic Kingdom. I’m wondering what you think Baker’s up to here, particularly in light of Mikey and Moonee’s respective characters and their journeys.

Christopher Notarnicola: It seems that Sean Baker has been exploring the interplay of reality and fantasy for at least the last decade. Starlet, like Red Rocket, follows an adult film actor, a job which requires its workers—maybe in a more direct sense even than other entertainers—to bring a dream to life, to embody reverie, to become fantasy laid bare. In his following film, Tangerine, this interplay is presented technically, giving a verité vibe with the camera work and streetside locales while also creating a dreamlike resonance with holiday décor and post-production color saturation. The Florida Project pits The Magic Castle Inn & Suites against Disney’s Magic Kingdom where Cinderella’s castle looms in the periphery, and—as you’ve pointed out—those aesthetic changes at the climax signal a dramatic turn toward the fantastic. I’m glad you brought up the Texas Killing Fields too because that moment in Red Rocket when they’re mentioned, almost as an aside, serves as a little reminder of the cultural mythoi we tend to develop around fringe spaces, people, and happenings. I think Baker is drawn toward these myth-making elements, especially when they’re rooted in realism, and maybe his recent filmography can be read as a collection of contemporary myths or fables or muddy morality plays. The ending of Red Rocket really stirs the waters between the actual and the imagined, even more so than that of The Florida Project where Moonee’s logistic and economic restrictions more readily suggest a departure from the possible, and this heightened ambiguity invites the viewer to speculate, to carry on the film’s discourse about subjects often left out of the conversation.

MG: One thing I think plays into that blurring of the real and the imaginary is Baker’s choice to score the moment with a distorted version of NSYNC’s “Bye, Bye, Bye,” the song playing backwards in a strange bookend to the film’s opening sequence, which blasts the pop anthem non-diegetically over Mikey’s return to Texas City. The song itself is a musical motif in the film. Lexi uses a line from the chorus as a barb to drive Mikey out of the house, while Strawberry plays her keyboard and sings a cover of it in a vulnerable moment of development that reveals a dimension to her character that Mikey has neglected in his visioning of her porn star potential. But the reversal of the song in the film’s final moments seems to indicate the cyclical journey of Mikey’s character, cast out once more with the same dream he left Texas City with years before, though whether he’s any closer to that dream is left for us to imagine.

The only other score in the film comes in brief moments of television coverage of the 2016 election cycle, the all too familiar voices of that election’s candidates selling dreams of “America’s promise” to the unenthused characters who watch the speeches from the blue gloom of their living room. It would be difficult to authentically capture this slice of America’s fringe without the figure of the 45th president looming somewhere, but Baker cleverly weaves the promises touted on TV into the subtext of these characters’ lives. In this way, the American Dream looms over Mikey’s schemes, as does the idea of facade—I’m thinking also of Lonnie’s stolen valor—as he cons his way closer to realizing those dreams.

CN: That backward track tips the scene into the surreal, doesn’t it? It also feels like a reflection of Mikey’s reversal of fortune, having just lost all but enough money for a bus ticket, and—I agree—it suggests that he’s stuck in a cycle, right back where he started both at the beginning of the film and when his adult film career began with Lexi long before his return to Texas City. He’s like the boy who wouldn’t grow up—the puer aeternus or Peter Pan—lost in a Neverland of the mind with all his youthful charisma and naivete. It’s fitting then that his anthem comes in the form of a pop hit by a mostly irrelevant—sorry, NSYNC—boy band. Mikey is not an ageless god, and I think he realizes his days in the porn industry are numbered when he leaves Los Angeles for his hometown to make a run at landing a more commonly held occupation, only to find that his specialized work experience has left him unqualified for every job except dealing weed and, of course, making porn. His identity as an adult entertainer is so mixed into his persona that one potential employer asks him to clarify whether his last name is Davies, his given surname, or Saber, his performer name, and for the first time—matched only by his reaction to Strawberry’s piano cover of “Bye, Bye, Bye” and his anticipation of her arrival at the film’s finale—the ever-talkative Mikey is at a loss for words.

I love that the whole story is backgrounded with the 2016 election. While our protagonist primes his red-headed ingénue to fuel the smoldering coals of his escapist fantasy, the inflammatory rhetoric of a presidential candidate stokes the long-held fires of a largely ignored American demographic. Remember the shock that swept over half the populace when Donald Trump won the presidential election? It’s almost like Sean Baker’s films are saying, hey, these might not be the most comfortable stories, but they’re happening, and it won’t do any good to ignore the people involved, so why not talk about them with compassion and honesty and a reverence for what society has deemed the impolite or even unmentionable aspects of our shared human experience? I don’t think Red Rocket is terribly concerned with engaging in overtly political discourse, but I do think governmental politics are flush with the performative, and the idea of performance or facade—as you’ve pointed out—is a major aspect of the story. This is most true for Mikey, who lies to literally everyone he encounters. Now that I’m also reflecting on Lonnie, who seems almost to live vicariously through Mikey, I wonder if there are any characters in this film who are innocent of roleplaying or misrepresenting themselves. Nearly every character puts on some kind of face to get what they want. Maybe save Ms. Phan, the donut shop owner.

MG: Though Ms. Phan was a little hard for me to read—she pops in every now and then to make sure Mikey isn’t stealing donuts, though she surprisingly lets him flirt with Strawberry behind the counter, perhaps not immune to his charm herself—I did like the way that Baker situates women as the entrepreneurs of the film. Ms. Phan owns the donut shop that supplies the hard hats with a steady stream of caffeine and sugar; Leondria is both matriarch to her family and a weed distribution business; Leondria’s daughter June orchestrates the muscle when it comes time to collect from Mikey. It’s June who first questions why Mikey would receive an AVN Award (Adult Video News, the Academy Awards of porn) for Best Oral: “Isn’t that about getting head?” she asks. “Then what they got to do with you? It’s not that you’re the one doing any work or anything.” Mikey won’t take the knock to his ego though, claiming that with three different girls, “the chances of it being the girl are pretty limited.” He insists upon his power in the scene—that he’s the one doing the fucking. “The female really has nothing to do with it,” he claims, but by the time he finishes describing his dominance over the scene—over his drooling, spitting (his words) costar—June has had enough. Strawberry too questions why a girl blowing a line of guys would have to share an award for something that’s “her scene.” While Mikey ultimately dodges her question of why he would be the one winning an award for it, the audience is left asking the same question. It’s one of the many cracks that start to form in Mikey’s lies—his manipulation of reality to suit a narrative that situates him as an agent in a position of power. The rug is of course ripped out from under him in the end, and that narrative crumbles.

CN: Right, the women in Red Rocket have pretty much all the power. Ms. Phan is a fun example because she operates on the periphery of the drama, very matter of fact—played, by the way, by Baker’s long-time collaborator and producer, who took on similar roles in Tangerine and The Florida Project, and can I just say that I’m here for the Shih-Ching Tsou multiverse. Leondra is the film’s apex example, orchestrating Mikey’s downfall and even suggesting, when her son needs help finding a bottle of hot sauce, that the world would collapse without her. I would hold up Lil, too, as a woman who has a great deal of power over Mikey, as he would be actually homeless if his mother-in-law didn’t agree to let him stay. Even Strawberry seems to have the upper hand since Mikey’s entire scheme is predicated on her continuous and voluntary participation, and although she oftentimes seems enamored by his boyish charm, she might be leading him down the path of her proto-boyfriend, Nash, who was under the false impression that they were dating. Sure, Mikey is playing Strawberry for his next meal ticket, but I can’t help but wonder if Strawberry isn’t playing Mikey right back for a ticket out of Texas City. When they meet, Mikey calls her by her given name, Raylee, but she corrects him, saying everyone calls her Strawberry, however Ms. Phan, Nash, and Nash’s mother all call her Raylee—no one calls her Strawberry except Mikey. If the two of them do run off and make it as porn stars in Los Angeles, how long before Strawberry shakes Mikey for the next big thing? I want to hold some hope that our suitcase-pimp-protagonist can pull out a win, but—despite his self-important, AVN-awarded performance—he’d probably do a lot better with a little teamwork.

Madison Garber is an English PhD student with a concentration in creative writing (fiction) at the University of North Texas. She received her MFA in creative writing from Florida Atlantic University, where she was the managing editor of Swamp Ape Review. Her work has appeared in Still Point Arts Quarterly and Watershed Review and is forthcoming in FOLIO.

 Christopher Notarnicola is an MFA graduate of Florida Atlantic University. His work has been published with American Short Fiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Best American Essays, Chicago Quarterly Review, Epiphany, Image, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Find him in Pompano Beach, Florida, and at christophernotarnicola.com.