Last Film at the Movies for 2021 - “Red Rocket” and other thoughts

This is a highly misleading poster. Which, given the protagonist, might make sense. 

It’s been a weird year. Let’s just get that out of the way. We are very far from returning to normal, if that ever was really a thing. We were able to return to theaters and even that still feels weird/exceptional to me. If the omicron variant continues to pick up steam, we may see that return to the theatrical experience draw down again, in which case, I am grateful for what I have been able to see on the big screen.

The latest is very much worthy of gratitude. Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket” is yet another film revelation of this guy’s immense talent. “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project” cemented him in my pantheon of original, heartfelt voices in 21st century cinema. 

His use of non-professional actors, his remarkable sense of place (he has a special feel for the Gulf Coast, both Florida’s and Texas’), but mostly his sense of the humanity of the characters puts him up there with Richard Linklater. Additionally, he doesn’t judge his characters. There is no finger-wagging or moral decisions drawn down on them because there is simply no condescension. If the people in his narratives are flawed and act not always in the best ways to achieve their goals, then quite frankly, they are just like us. 

This time around, though, the main character does leave a lot to be desired. Mikey is a down on his luck, homeless (and beat up) pornstar returned to Texas City and we already know that he is disruptor of immense proportions for all who cross his path. He walks to his estranged wife’s house right off the bus and his charming bullshit spews forth like oil at Spindletop circa 1905. Simon Rex is glorious as a guy some of us know pretty well, much to our chagrin. The hustler, the survivor who will talk you to death or at least out of whatever cash you have on hand, the dreamer who could get his ass handed to him one minute only to convince himself of immanent stardom in the next. Let me be clear: there is nothing about this guy to emulate, but Jesus H on toast, is he charming. 

One of the most deluded protagonists in film…and an asshole!

He wheedles his way back into his wife’s life in a little bungalow in a part of Texas I know pretty well, swears he’ll find a job and contribute (he doesn’t - well, not a straight job; he does wind up moving a lot of weed to the oil workers), and hangs out with Lonnie whose life he will eventually ruin before the film’s end en route to potentially doing the same to Ray Lee/Strawberry, the 17 year old ingenue at the donut shop he frequents and who he begins grooming as his re-entry into the porn industry in L.A. 

Family time

That’s it in a nutshell. Details would destroy a remarkable film that feels at once so visceral and dreamlike at the same time. The visceral elements are there in the performances, grounded as they are in a tight script and played by first time actors or at least, non-pros with astounding naturalness. The dreamlike aspect just comes from the way we buy into Mikey’s bullshit. Over and over again. Or not buy into it but how we almost see the world through his eyes the more he runs his mouth. 

You can smell the refineries, the dope, the donuts, and the desperation. You can feel the moist Gulf Coast air on your skin as we see Mikey riding his bicycle at night from his rendezvous with Strawberry (in her mother’s truck…as she drops him off at a large house in the ‘burbs around Beaumont, it looks like…maybe Galveston). 

We don’t know the specifics of how or why Mikey wound up as he did but it’s not hard to come up with a scenario of how he fucked up and got rolled for being a dipshit. It really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he’s so lacking in self-awareness and has no concept of others that it’s unlikely he’s going to learn from his mistakes. And they do appear to huge. Boy, oh, boy. 

Suzanna Son, Bree Elrod, and others in the cast are revelations. There isn’t a bum note in the piece. Son plays Strawberry with a naturalness I haven’t seen in a young actress in recent memory. Bree Elrod takes Mikey’s wife Lexi to places I don’t think I’ve seen an actress do with a character before. The material strikes me as that fresh. In fact, the only filmmaker I can think of - beside Linklater - that has this kind of organic natural feel is John Cassavetes. Even then, the stakes here are more intimate, closer to the mundane reality of living a grifting life and never learning that you’re not in a movie.

Run, Strawberry! Run! Don’t fall for this guy’s BS!

Lonnie as played by Ethan Darbone, has his own imaginary life that gets him into a little bit of trouble before Mikey essentially destroys - mostly unwittingly or at first, anyway - his life. He’s a gentle soul who’s just trying to get by with his widowed father in the same dead end neighborhood where he was raised and baby sat by Mikey and Lexi. 

Judy Hill as Leondria, Mikey’s supplier and Brittney Rodriguez as her daughter June, round out the principal cast and Lordy, they’re so, so good. They’re the reality check on Mikey’s bullshit and he doesn’t realize that not everyone’s on board with that BS until the final scene.

I would be remiss if I didn’t call attention to Lil, Lexi’s mother/Mikey’s mother-in-law, played by Brenda Deiss. She reminds me of a far less eccentric Edith Massey. I don’t mean to draw a visual comparison, just that Deiss has that same wildly compassionate quality that Massey did even in the weirdest moments of John Waters’ visions for her. There’s something in her delivery that reminds me of Edith is what I’m saying. But Deiss has something else: she’s got a real sense of being who this character is or is supposed to be. 

The same could be said of the whole cast but the movie belongs to Mikey, Lexi, and Strawberry. The film begins with one shoe having dropped. We wait for the other one and when it does, we end with a note of ambiguity. Depending on how much you think you know Mikey will determine how you respond to that final scene. 

I can’t recommend “Red Rocket” enough. Baker and his screenwriting partner Chris Bergoch have crafted several amazing films and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this may be their masterpiece.

Baker drafted Drew Daniels as cinematographer, whose most recent work that I’ve seen has been a couple of episodes of “Euphoria”. Interestingly, he also filmed “Slacker 2011” a “reimagining of Richard Linklater’s ‘Slacker’”, keeping a kind of lineage to the fore, eh?

I could go on, but I’m enjoying just playing over images in my mind and suspect that there’s much more to come from Baker and company. 

Other Stuff/Thoughts

 

Like everyone else, of course I saw “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and thrilled to the fan service. As a flick, it is swell pop-corn entertainment and it hit all the emotional beats it was intended to. Scenery chewing, action, and melodrama that all blended together in yet another billion dollar plus wheel in the multiverse of Marvel (and Sony…Sony’s biggest movie ever! Congratulations, I guess?)

Always a pleasure to see everyone and a fine blockbuster for the holidays.

“Don’t Look Up” scored big with me. However, I am the choir to whom it is preaching but/and it’s much more about the contemporaneous inability to address existential threats than just climate change. McKay scores big with a big cast and I find it hilarious that so many critics are taking umbrage with the film for its being too cynical or smug or even condescending. Sometimes, you just have to call it as you sees it, gents. I’m in the McKay camp (along with apparently, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Streep, Jonah Hill, and Ron Perlman, among others.)

After watching “Hawkeye”, I felt a need for a Florence Pugh fix. “Malevolent” wasn’t it. It’s a stupid flick trying to be a Blumhouse level thriller/ghost story, etc. She’s fine. Actually, the performances were all solid, but it’s a flaccid to lousy script with directing that assumed that script was smarter than it was.

R.I.P. Betty White.

This angers me. To be sure, she was a marvelous woman with 99 years of life under her belt, but her passing on the last day of (yet another) dumpster fire of a year was saddening.

Lastly

That said, Happy New Year, anyway. Tonight’s a good night for “The Thin Man” and maybe even, its sequel, “After the Thin Man.” We can begin afresh tomorrow with a new number to affix to our correspondence and posts and birthdays.

Lots of cool new films coming out that I hope I’ll get to see while I try to finish my stuff here. Look for more 30s Hitch, a series of series of amazing women in cinema (Nazimova, Anna May Wong, and Maya Dueren), a couple of long-form pieces on early Cronenberg and the career of Kevin Smith and who knows what else. It’s not like there’s a lack of stuff to write about in the world of cinema.

Seriously, though; happy new year to all and see you in the dark!