#Ethan Darbone

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Red Rocket Sean Baker. 2021

Ocean Cabaret 1244 Gulf Fwy, Texas City, TX 77591, USA See in map

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Red Rocket (Sean Baker, 2021)

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Red Rocket (2021)

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Red Rocket

directed by Sean Baker, 2021

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RED ROCKET

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Red Rocket (2021) Sean Baker

January 15th 2022

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Red Rocket, Sean Baker (2021)

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2.18.22

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Red Rocket

(USA 2021) Sean Baker has been on a roll with his last few films. He’s heavy, but he wins me over because he makes me love his characters, all of whom are fringe throwaways — illegal migrants, petty thieves, sex workers, transgenders, drug addicts, dirty little kids — getting by in an economically hostile environment. He quietly but powerfully makes his points about benevolence in contemporary…

[jmunneytumbler]

'Red Rocket' Puts It All on Display, and To That I Say: 'Okay!'

Red Rocket (CREDIT: A24) Starring: Simon Rex, Suzanna Son, Bree Elrod, Brenda Deiss, Judy Hill, Brittany Rodriguez, Ethan Darbone, Shih-Ching Tsou, Marlon Lambert Director: Sean Baker Running Time: 128 Minutes Rating: R for Getting Physical Release Date: December 10, 2021 (Theaters) Adult entertainment – or “pornography,” if you will – has become much more democratized and much less stigmatized…

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Red Rocket (dir. Sean Baker)

-Jere Pilapil- 8.5/10

Sean Baker’s Red Rocket fucks. LOL etc. Get it? It’s about a porn star. Really, though, it’s more about a kind of mentality, a kind of denialism that creates a kind of person and leads to damaging behaviors. It’s not a coincidence that throughout the movie, we hear snippets of Donal Trump’s speeches. Our main character, Mikey Saber, played fantastically by Simon Rex, moved through life like a tornado of broken and empty promises, like like is an improv scene and nearly everything thrown his way is useful to him and his ends. It’s a portrait of narcissism that nonetheless seduces you into Mikey’s worldview. But that’s the gift of narcissists, of course.

Mikey Saber is a former porn star, down on his luck and back in his hometown of Texas City. His tail’s between his legs, but he doesn’t know or show it. He moves in with his ex Lexi (still legally married but very estranged) and her mother Lil. We don’t know exactly what brings him back, but hearing him spew face-paced tales about his life in LA and how frequently he adds “but I had a falling out with…” as an aside, we get the picture all the same. He’s pulling back strategically, he thinks, giving himself time to figure out what’s next and come back stronger and bigger than ever. Meanwhile, he’s a deadbeat: local businesses are unwilling to hire someone with a 17-year resume gap, filled, after some prodding, with sex work. He by chance meets Strawberry (Suzanna Son), a 17-year old on the cusp of 18, and they strike up a relationship. He’s grooming her for adult stardom, a protege he can manage back into the good graces of the adult industry.

There’s a term in pro wrestling: kayfabe, the way wrestlers treat the world within their show as real. It’s the insistence that staged events are real, to convince the audience that they are and to get them emotionally invested. In some ways, porn works in a similarly, blurring the lines between the performance and the performer, and Mikey Saber never breaks kayfabe. In his view, he’s a great performer done wrong in some way, on the way back to prominence. He befriends his temporary neighbor Lonnie (Ethan Darbone) and takes long drives with him, regaling Lonnie with the stories of famous porn stars he’s fucked, how they’re fucked up, awards he’s won, how he’s the visionary behind the award-winning scenes. Like all great fiction, Red Rocket operates in the spaces where it’s not telling us everything: we don’t exactly see or hear what Lonnie thinks of Mikey, but we can hear his enthusiasm for Mikey’s stories wane as the movie goes on. I think Lonnie buys into the kayfabe because he’s a fake, too, in a way. It’s aspirational.

At some point during the 2016 presidential election, the comedian Jen Kirkman tweeted that anyone who’s been in show business has met the kind of hustler Donald Trump is. Mikey is, of course, a spiritual cousin to that. I was a stand up comedian for eight years (at middling-at-best success), and if you’ve never been in that world, you’d be shocked at how often you meet the the Mikey Sabers of the world: cunning, charismatic, but less successful than they’re dreamed, or on the other side of that dream success, and willing to talk and bargain and twist your arm into believing in them and going with them on some hare-brained bullshit. If you don’t know it when you see it, it’s easy to get suckered in until you’re in too deep. You get the sense that that may happen to Strawberry, but it definitely happened to Lexi, who, from Mikey’s telling, split from him, got into drugs and burned herself out of the adult entertainment industry. There’s probably a broad outline of a true story there, but Mikey moves too fast for anyone to apply scrutiny. Or more accurately, the people he talks to are either too naive or apathetic to ask, or they’ve already been burned and know it’s no use.

Just like in real life, though, that person sticks around and drifts in and out of others’ lives. They have a way of sticking around. The movie and its protagonist are morally ambiguous, but they are fun to watch. Mikey Saber’s probably a shit ton of fun to be around and to hang out with, as long as you keep your wits about you. The movie provides him with some fun misadventures, right up through a wild and unpredictable third act that yanks the movie over the line from character study to farce. Like its main character, though, the charms can come and go and can overstay their welcome. You’d be forgiven for wondering if this thing is actually going anywhere, or if this is another one of Mikey’s tall tales. It gets there, pretty spectacularly, I’d say, but they could have cut some of the bullshit.