Of course, shit gets weird, and Mikey’s eventually forced to receive some manner of comeuppance for his actions, but the road there is as unexpected as it is hilarious to watch unfold. And so begins Mikey’s longest con of all, attempting to juggle the responsibilities that he feels he still holds to his wife - upkeep around the house, occasional sex, a nurturing of her fantasy that they’ll get back together one day - while he courts Strawberry, hinting to her the riches that would wait in her future as he slowly breaks each chain in the line that connects her to her past in Texas. Mikey just sees two things: a great lay, and, more importantly, his ticket back into the adult industry, should he be able to persuade her to actually leave Texas behind and head out to L.A. He doesn’t really care that she’s 17, he doesn’t care that she’s got a boyfriend, he doesn’t care if she graduates from fucking high school or not. She’s a gorgeous young light redhead named Strawberry (Suzanna Son), who is equal parts charming and a little evil in that alluring way that gets the blood flowing to both heads on Mikey’s body. Yet all those plans are scuttled when notices the girl working behind the counter while he’s taking his hosts on a trip to the Donut store as thanks (and further-buttering-up) for housing him and feeding him and, you know, ensuring his survival. For a moment - just a brief moment - it seems like Mikey might get his shit together and put down some roots, and maybe a full-on resumption of his relationship might be in the cards. in the same way that a kid might admire an older brother. He starts moving low-level weight for a drug dealer, who holds court in her backyard each day with an assortment of local folks and also begins hanging with the next-door neighbor, a Stolen Valor-ing doofus named Ronnie (Ethan Darbone), who just so conveniently has a car (he’s biking around on an ancient step-through, after all) and a hefty admiration for what Mikey was up to in L.A. Somehow, Mikey manages to smooth-talk his way back into their house and begins sleeping on their couch, while he schemes and plots to rebuild his life. After a lengthy falling out of the industry that, in his dubious telling, involved MS-13 and a whole bunch of drug-addled porn stars, he returns to Texas on the skint, begging his estranged wife (Bree Elrod) and her mother (Brenda Deiss), who absolutely hate him for what he put them through when their relationship collapsed years ago. Like most of his projects, Baker’s filled out his cast with mostly unknowns and real off-the-street people from where he’s filming, but unlike in those films, a recognizable face bedrocks most of the action as the protagonist: That of Simon Rex, the MTV VJ, and comedian, who uses every ounce of his charisma and guile to bring Mikey Saber, washed-up porn star and general deadbeat, to life. You know those Japanese companies that specialize in making the deepest black paints and inks in the whole wide world, the kind that, if you covered a room in them, your animal brain would start tripping out and you’d start seeing lizards and dead relatives and shit? Well, that’s this film’s approach to humor, beginning with the title - which may be a quadruple-entendre, if I did my counting right - and ending with its gut-busting mauling of N’Sync’s greatest hit, which may be forever associated with flopping genitalia mid-sprint in the minds of anyone under the age of 20 who views this in (hopefully) some distant year.
Simon rex house full#
Like Baker’s other work, it exists on the margins of a small community full of big fishes, though unlike in, say, Tangerine or The Florida Project, it contains a fiendish perspective, a lead as morally compromised and hilariously depraved as the film’s heart is black. Sean Baker’s Red Rocketis a rare breed of cinematic animal, though, with the presence of both Bad Luck Banging and Pleasure on the horizon, it may simply be the inaugural installment of the newly revitalized Narrative Film About Pornography shock-adjacent subgenre by sheer happenstance. Check out our full coverage from I FFB Fall Focus 2021, as well as our archive of past years. Editor’s Note: This review originally ran in October as part of our 2021 Independent Film Festival Boston’s Fall Focus coverage, and we’re publishing it today ahead of the film’s wider release.
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