"Red Rocket" Review: A Successful Launch Of Human Disaster

Simon Rex wields a mighty saber in this strawberry slice of backwoods heaven.

May 1, 2022

At 18, Simon Rex worked at a potato sack factory in Oakland when he met a young model, and the two began dating. He dropped everything, moved to Los Angeles, and set up shack with the woman and her child.

It was an overwhelming time for a teenager. He was out in the world, living in the hub of the entertainment industry, and playing house with a child referring to him, not even legal drinking age, as “Daddy.” At his girlfriend’s urging, he met with photographer Brad Posey. Posey ran a magazine that featured young, attractive men in the nude and produced pornographic videos targeted at a gay audience. In a week, Rex shot three solo masturbation scenes.

It was no different than the story of countless “gay-for-pay” pornstars, although Rex never explicitly “went gay:” a young, attractive man, well-endowed and strapped for cash, uses his body to make money doing what every man does twice a day. In a puritanical culture that condemned publicizing private activities, it was a story no one wanted to hear.

While he worked as an MTV VJ in the mid-90s, publications discovered Rex’s videos and made them a national story. Rex insists the videos were not the reason for his termination from the network but knows it cost him many opportunities. Acting roles got lost, his reputation got ruined, and he got tagged with the cutting moniker “former gay porn star.”

Ironically, that term made more of his career than real life ever did. Despite a brief stint on The WB’s sitcom What I Like About You and a prominent role in Scary Movie 3, Rex never made much of a splash in the industry, relegated to sporadic pop-ups in Lifetime movies or network TV.

Alas, everything happens for a reason. Rex pursued a rap career under the name Dirty Nasty and eventually moved to Joshua Tree, California, where he lives off the grid. Despite his reluctance to discuss his porn past, and the fact that public perception of it weighs on the film more than his experiences, one could argue it led him to Red Rocket.

After his career flounders, washed-up porn star Mikey has moved back to his small Texas hometown and convinces his ex-wife, Lexi, and her mother, Lil, to let him stay with them. Despite the initial agreement, he earns an extended stay by selling weed. After taking Lexi and Lil to a doughnut shop, he becomes infatuated with Strawberry, the teenage girl behind the counter, sparking an immoral, sex-filled, drug-dealing journey to reclaim his adult film fame.

Red Rocket conjoins with its locale to avoid relying on its premise. It never shies away from exposing the reality of backwoods America. No one who has lived in or near such a town can refute what Red Rocket purports, from the treatment of simple pleasures as rare delights to the loose morals that make it acceptable for a man pushing 40 to have a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl.

Every rendezvous gets shown in graphic detail: she fellates him in a car; we see his orgasm. We watch as she reveals that she’s swallowed his semen. We see her commend his endowment and the physical liberation it has inspired. We watch him gleefully thrust into her in the truck bed. We watch him coerce her into videotaping an encounter (effectively producing child pornography), a pseudo-audition designed to normalize the behavior so he can more easily manipulate her into starting a porn career once she turns 18. We watch him get aroused at the thought of sleeping with her before going home and screwing his ex-wife, bending her over and eliciting words of affirmation to fulfill the fantasy of bedding Strawberry.

Mikey is not a man that reflects the general populace, partly because reflections mean nothing to him. In that way, he aspires to something bigger, if not necessarily greater. A movie about this man cannot hold back, hint at things it wants us to believe, and imply his experiences. Movies often strive to evoke a time or feeling, some place in the world it can feign understanding of with tracking shots, dialect, or music. We know they are false, and that is why we love them. We adore their disingenuousness because we are disingenuous. We do not know what it means to walk that path, no matter how many movies cozy up to our arrogance to convince us otherwise. Every time it throws in a weepy moment, an old-time car, or endorses a perspective more visceral than the last, allowing us to believe this is the film that shows how things are, we rejoice.

Red Rocket doesn’t use weepy moments. It doesn’t exploit old cars or endorse a visceral perspective that cuts to the core of small-town America in a more earnest way than the last. It shows the truth, that of a man living in a past vision of success, who has no qualms about using people as stepping stones to return to it.

He is undeterred by people getting hurt, used, or arrested, making him a product of his hometown more than he’d like to admit. Every time we expect him to get shocked into reality, he leans more into his own. We anticipate his disappointment when Strawberry reveals her age, only to learn he rejoices in her youth. He is not excited by it in a predatory way, aching for the moment he can touch someone underage. He is relieved the law allows him to sleep with her and that soon she can legally pursue an adult film career.

His only objections to immorality are self-serving. He does not chastise others for their dishonesty, only how it could reflect upon him. Everything is to evade public scrutiny he does not realize can never come because he is less noteworthy than he realizes. Los Angeles may have reach, but that reach does not extend to the people determining his fate. Whenever he places another stone in front of him, the waters get disturbed. He can only hope they do not disrupt his path in the process. Every time he escapes unscathed, he soldiers on unbothered.

It is not the story of a man on the rise, aspiring to a greater moral purpose, learning the error of his ways and how to begin anew. He does not take a journey, using self-inflicted impediments to build character or repair fractured relationships. He is a man who’s tasted a life many only dream of, and he is not the type of person to let that life go. He has gotten chewed up and spit out but doesn’t seem to realize it. All he can see is what is ahead, and the road can only get paved by him one step at a time.

It is not an admirable tale, but it never aims for that. It never layers Mikey or demands that we feel one way or another about him. It accepts him for who he is and thus understands its only job is to show him honestly. Inside his quest is a vague appreciation of how earnestly we pursue our ventures, and perhaps a gusto for always taking the selfish course we deny ourselves, even if we do not seek the same pleasures as Mikey. All of that value is sitting there, but the movie balances forcing it down our throats and rendering it invisible. Its honesty works as people do, and a movie this true to people will always feel truthful.

Red Rocket is the rare film that does not leave itself open to interpretation but instead leaves itself open to attachment. Every time Mikey takes that selfish course to further his ambitions, he thrives. He gains sexual satisfaction, monetary advancement, and a concrete means of securing his future. The only moment he chooses decency, he loses everything.

But who is to say this is all furthering. The film never glorifies his attempt to recapture his former life, and that life was the beginning of as many beginnings as endings. He is here now in Texas Town, with the same woman he departed nearly 20 years before, struggling now as he was then. All of his hopeful idealism and delusions of grandeur do not change the fact that he is returning to a place that ultimately did more harm than good. We can wonder about the times we trap ourselves in destructive cycles while convinced our cause was righteous or what value there is in trying again when we fail.

Inside Mikey’s story are many truths, but the movie never lectures us on what we should take away. If it is to be a slice of humanity, even if that slice has spoiled, it cannot tell us precisely what to make of it. We can only decide what truth rings truest to us. The movie is for everyone, but without forcing itself to be something specific, or us to acknowledge it that way.

In this way, it is more sincere than most movies. It does not contort its protagonist or reshape the world he inhabits to fit broader themes. It never betrays itself to a message or sacrifices its integrity to score a big moment. Even at its most ridiculous, during that naked mad dash, it feels inevitable.

After all, this is his world. People are missing teeth. The idea of being a “slut” is just as arbitrary as ironic: in a small southern town where everyone is on the gravelly road to nowhere, a woman’s sexual activities, which for better or worse may carry her from somewhere none of them realize they should leave, are of great importance. The local news coverage is slow-paced and jumbled, and all the food is off-brand. It's okay to hop from person to person or carry on behind someone's back. It is a million miles from where he wants to return but a next-door neighbor to who he truly is. Mikey, who fancies himself an LA hotshot, is a small-town immoralist. You cannot escape who you are.

The irony succeeds because it never tells us to hate Mikey. It lets us into his realizations, the few of them he has, but never allows him to seize the moment. After all, that isn’t who Mikey is, no matter how desperately an audience wants it to be. He will not realize the sadness of Strawberry, having looked up his movies, inadvertently familiarizing herself with the origin story she’s soon to copy, wistfully recalling her discoveries. He will not change all he’s planned for her, and thus for himself, to correct course. He will not gaze upon her topless, showing him the one true talent she has, and feel he is taking something from her by shoving her down a course that will never allow her to realize her full potential. He will not return from bedding a young girl who reawakens his sexuality but whose immaturity ultimately pushes him away. He is not a man in need of reawakening. He is a man who makes others wake up, for better or worse.

In our case, we awaken to a complex protagonist who inspires just as much loathing as loving. We hate everything he does on principle alone; the people he affects are no more sympathetic than he. He inadvertently inflicts a bizarre justice on his leeching ex-wife, her greedy mother-in-law, a stolen valor perp, and a young man whose family resorts to violence to resolve fractured egos. He is not affecting anyone whose suffering draws concern, but every time he affects one person, he worsens his cause in our eyes. His emptiness is a slow burn. You cannot help but love him the way everyone else does, with all the fast talking, easy charm, and earnestness, even when you sense he’s deceiving you. Every time he breaches a line we want him to realize, and every time the movie teases us with the maybe, it slaps us with the “No.” Since Mikey does not understand that word, the film is always honest.

Red Rocket works in ways a director can make us admire. It doesn’t exploit its setting to establish a character whose roots matter only in the abstract. Instead, it makes everything about him and his story a product of its environment, using locals to add texture instead of getting real actors with bad accents. It contains itself in simple settings, from a podunk carnival to an unadorned donut shop, a tiny house where every room is the size of a prison cell, to the mall stuck in the 80s. Mikey’s spiritual bankruptcy isn’t a contrivance but a genuine creation of who he is and from where he comes. It captures humanity, or at least an authentic notion of its potential for seediness and desperation, as a reality, not a device.

But what sets Red Rocket apart is how willing it is to exist. Few films will try to convince us of something, or someone, with as much sincerity. Most would have hinted at Mikey’s yearning for Strawberry, played chaste with her sexual openness, staged sex scenes to reveal as little as possible, and had Mikey describe his porn antics more subtly. As he sits with a woman who questions his winning an award for oral sex he did not perform, he explains the significance of his skillset. It takes talent to work a woman’s head as she fellates you to maximize the salivation and elicit as much auditory sensation as possible. It disgusts her but is nothing to Mikey because nothing but his desires is anything to Mikey.

Red Rocket has balls but is matter-of-fact about having them, a rare combination in a film landscape that dances around conviction to play abstract. Even with an ambiguous ending, it manages to be compact. Anything we take from its conclusion is only allowable within the confines of what the story gives us. We can never stray too far from the course to satisfy our ego or concoct ideas about the future based on things that have nothing to do with what we saw on screen. It isn’t soulful, roaring with heart or slaying with humor. Its drama does not dispel notions or tug at the heartstrings. It is just a slice that masters making life seem ludicrous while still retaining its grip on reality. It has much to show us but only does so to suit its needs. It is not unlike Rex, who showed us quite a bit to meet his needs 30 years ago, but it is far more like him now, taking advantage of an opportunity to show what got missed out on as we relegated him to a laughing stock. If every film had as much to say as Red Rocket and would say it as casually, we would be better off.