I didn’t miss the opportunity to watch ‘Red Rocket‘ (2021) because it is the previous film by
Sean Baker, the director of ‘Anora’. This was one of the revelations of the year for me and not only for me, as evidenced by the awards and nominations it received, including the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The surprise was even greater. I had liked ‘Anora’. Well, I liked ‘Red Rocket‘ even more. I found in this film the fluid narrative, the slightly cynical humor, the authenticity and especially the empathetic approach through which the director manages to make us care about characters on the fringes of society, of those we usually don’t meet and in fact wouldn’t really want to meet.
The story takes place in Texas City in the summer of 2016. Now and than, we hear voices of the presidential election campaign of that year on the televisions turned on in the background. The heroes in the film, however, do not seem to care about politics. Mikey is a porn movies actor who returns with only pants and a tank top on him and 22 dollars in his pocket to the poor area of his childhood town, to the house of Lexi, the wife he abandoned long ago. He is running away from something, his time as an actor has passed, he perhaps wants to start over from scratch. The people of the town located near a huge oil refinery do not really welcome him, from Lexi, who reproaches him for his abandonment and absence, to the owners or bosses of various businesses who refuse to hire a man who has a huge lapse on his CV due to the many years he was involved in the pornographic industry. In order to be able to pay the rent that his wife and mother-in-law ask from him in order to stay in the house, he returns to his old job as a drug dealer. His only friend is Lonnie, his neighbor and former schoolmate, a loner with his own problems, who is fascinated by Mikey’s stories about his adventures in California. Mikey meets Raylee nicknamed Strawberry, a young high school girl less than 18 years old, who works as a salesgirl at a donut shop. What at first seems like a flirtation between a mature man and a Lolita-like teenager progresses towards a more serious and dangerous relationship for everybody involved.
Sean Baker is original in the way he chooses his actors and formidable in the way he directs them. Most of them are non-professional actors or with little experience in big screen films. Simon Rex (Mikey) is the only one who has a rich filmography, but many of the titles are television films or music videos. The formidable Suzanna Son plays the role of the girl who has just come out of her teens (she was 26 at the time of filming tough) and I hope that she will find suitable castings for a career worth launching. Bree Elrod (Lexi), who completes the very unromantic triangle, is also practically a debutante in a leading role. Sean Baker uses the naturalness and native talent of the actors and skips rehearsals to gain spontaneity and create authentic characters, who live their roles as the story advances. The streets and surroundings of Texas City gradually become familiar to us, with the houses, streets, refinery, gas station or donut shop that are filmed most often with a mobile camera on 16mm film. The angles are sometimes those of Edward Hopper’s paintings, and the coloring is adapted to the moods of the characters: sometimes they remind me of ‘Barbie’, other times of ‘Gran Torino’. The ending leaves the viewer stoned in a question. Sean Baker is for me the cinematic discovery of 2024. ‘Red Rocket‘ is the confirmation.