Red Rocket is one of my favorite movies of the last few years, a dusty, energetic, lived-in comedy with an excellent central performance from Simon Rex.
Rex plays Mikey, a former porn star whose life has hit the skids. Down on his luck, he regroups in his Texas hometown, sleeping on his mother-in-law’s sofa and selling dime bags to construction workers. Mikey is a mooch, happy to freeload, charm, and con his way to what he wants, but one of the film’s key details is that he’s not at all lazy. (No surprise to anyone familiar with the adult entertainment industry.) He expends energy and effort all the time, tirelessly working towards his goals. He fills out applications. He moves product. He mounts relentless, effective charm offensives to secure everything from rides to garage sale deals.
All this effort could, and does, start to make a real place for him in Texas City—but it’s a small, unglamorous place. He wants this to be a stopgap, not a life. He fucks his ex-wife to get off the couch, not to rekindle their relationship. He’s looking for his way back to bigger and better things, and he finds it in 17-year-old Raylee, a.k.a. Strawberry (Suzanna Son).
She’s beautiful, vivacious, magnetic. She likes sex. She likes him.
And he likes her … especially as his ticket back into the industry. She’s a real find, sure to win Best Newcomer at the AVNs—maybe even good enough for an unprecedented three-year sweep. He’ll lasso her fresh-faced star and, as her boyfriend and “manager,” ride it straight back to the top. This kind of male parasitism of female adult industry talent, Red Rocket tells us, would make him a “suitcase pimp.”
Mikey doesn’t like that term, but he works his ass off to get the title, seducing and grooming Strawberry with a precisely calibrated blend of charisma, playfulness, flirtation, lies, half-truths, and frog-boiling hidden plans. He has an endgame in mind from the start, and he knows it will go much further than she’s saying she’s comfortable with, but hey, that’s a problem to be solved once they’re in LA. Strawberry’s qualms are never real to him, never worth any kind of honesty; they’re obstacles to be jumped over or veered around. Strawberry herself is never completely real to him—she begins as a jackpot and ends as a fantasy, and at a climactic midpoint of their relationship, he’s absolutely gob-smacked to learn that she found out information he didn’t directly give her, even though it’s incredibly obvious that she would. As if she could never have talked to anyone else, as if she stops existing when they’re not together.
In that moment—right before the drop on a rollercoaster, plunged into motion beyond his control, rocked by a revelation he somehow didn’t see coming—Mikey’s expression is frozen. It’s a great scene, and it’s paralleled in an even better one that may be my favorite of the whole film:
Strawberry’s mom is out of town, so they have the house to themselves. As usual, Mikey is more or less on the clock, using this as concentrated pitch-time: it’s when he finally gets Strawberry to film a scene with him, “just for them,” though she insists on doing it on her own phone, not his. She would’ve gotten thousands of dollars just for that, he tells her. And to give that time to sink in, he asks about her piano. Can she play him something?
She can. It’s an achy, throaty ballad cover of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” the song that—unbeknownst to them both—accompanied Mikey’s unceremonious, luggage-free return to Texas City.
It’s a good performance—Son is a gifted musician, and this instantly went on my Spotify—but partway through, the camera moves from Strawberry to Mikey, watching her from the bed. Once again, faced with proof of Strawberry’s independent inner life, the perpetual hustler, the man so often running a game and working an angle, is still.
This time, however, his face is unreadable.
What is he thinking? Since her back is turned to him, is he powering down, a constant performer finally “off-stage” enough to breathe, to feign nothing, convey nothing? Is this exhausted emptiness? Is he simply enjoying the song? (Rex moves his head just a little, as if he’s tracking the tune.) Is it resonating with him more than he can understand? Is he bored? Whatever it is, it’s a real reverie, one he snaps out of only when Strawberry’s singing cuts off as she sheepishly admits she doesn’t have the rest down yet: it gets a natural half-smile and a chuckle out of him even before he’s back “on” with a round of applause.
I like to think that this is as close as Mikey comes to a moment of conscience. He is, just for the duration of that half-finished song, a monkey before a monolith, confronted with the fact that this girl has a life and a self that have nothing to do with his plans for her. He usually sees her in a narrow way, concentrating only on what serves his purpose. She likes sex, and she’s good at it? He can use that. She likes music, and she’s good at it? He … can’t use that. (I assume porn that features full musical numbers is in short supply.) She has talents and interests that he’s been disregarding, and is going to go on to disregard, just as he disregards her goals and plans.
But for a minute, he sees her—this person that he’s using and misleading, this teenager he is, for his own benefit, steering into an industry that can be rough and even ruinous. Will she be happy? Would she be better off doing something else?
That something else wouldn’t involve him, though.
And then the song ends.
Red Rocket is currently streaming on Pluto and Plex.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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What did we watch?
MLB on TBS, ALT at PHI – A weird game in that neither starter looked great but neither team was hitting. The final was 2-0 Phillies, and one of those runs scored on a walk.
Justified, Season One, Episode Twelve, “Fathers & Sons”
“You are determined to be contrary, even if it gets you stuck up on a tree!”
If there’s a theme to this show, it’s how superficial emotion can fuck up your judgement. It feels as baked into the construction of Justified as consequence is to The Shield. I think part of the reason Raylan hates Kentucky is because there are people here who fuck his judgement up constantly; within this alone, you have Arlo provoking him into rage, Winona making him horny, and Ava just making him erratic (Boyd doesn’t interact with Raylan this episode, and I don’t know the word for what he provokes out of Raylan). Raylan owns during the episodic plots because he can be distant and rational; Art repeatedly asks Raylan to either recuse himself or harden the fuck up and for good reason. It’s borderline copaganda in the sense that it argues this is ‘why’ we have police – someone who can dispassionately keep order. Certainly, this is how most authority I’ve known in my life (by definition Australian, as compared to American authority) has justified itself.
This is what’s interesting about Boyd – he doesn’t want to be rational and he does want to surrender himself to emotion, and he just can’t. The scene of him in church, leading the congregation, is what he wants and he can do a passable imitation (enough to fool idiots and people already in the mood) but that scene of him threatening Dewey in the last episode is who he really is. It’s what parallels him to Raylan; Raylan can pretend to be purely rational for a while but really is the angriest man in the world, and Boyd desperately wants to be a mystic but is actually an extremely practical schemer.
The minor theme to this show – the parallel to The Shield’s interest in surveillance – is the specific evils of poverty. Poverty tends to force people to make up reasons to feel good about themselves and that’s almost always done through strict social rules; you might be tired and broke, but you can still follow the rules better than other people. Bo’s henchmen play that out with a parody of hospitality, as they claim that the long-dead Bowman’s domicile rights give them the right to intrude on Ava’s home. Bo himself is the most extreme version of that; within this episode, he gets a great line claiming sympathy to Boyd’s religious convictions (“I could never walk the path, but I understood its virtue.”) and also completely trashes them to Ava, and it’s impossible to discern his true feelings because in both scenes, he’s calculating to the person he’s talking to.
Arlo stealing from the Feds to work with Bo is so funny. Bo’s disgust with Arlo is great.
Biggest Laugh: Art in response to Raylan offering him a drink: “No, maybe later, like after breakfast.”
Top Ownage: Less for the content and more for the sheer brass balls of the guy saying it and who he’s saying it to: “Listen, Lynard Skynard, next time I open a dick-sucking business, I’ll ask for your advice!”
Art says something like, “Don’t be drinking all my good whiskey ’cause your daddy didn’t hug you enough!” So many dudes in pop culture with daddy issues but this show gets how petty and facile that can be.
Justified is copaganda, it’s just really good copaganda.
You’ll Never Get Rich – turns out I took such an extended break in my “watch a movie from every year” project that I accidentally did 1940 twice. So I decided to fix things by watching another Fred Astaire musical but actually from 1941 this time. It’s all in service of clearing my physical backlog anyway so never mind.
Anyway I put this one off for ages because the other Fred Astaire / Rita Hayworth pairing (You Were Never Lovelier) is one of my favourites and I knew this one wouldn’t live up to it. That proved to be the case, this one has quite a few issues. But it’s still good fun and has plenty to recommend it – the comedy is largely effective, the dance numbers are (naturally) great, and the stars have good chemistry. Unfortunately the military-themed plot conspires to keep them apart, and also Fred’s character is kind of an asshole which doesn’t really suit his screen presence – every time he gets into trouble he resorts to lying to Hayworth’s face and it’s hard to root for them to get together at the end, especially given that the big finale revolves aroung him tricking her into marrying him. It feels like the plot might work in a truly zany screwball film but Astaire’s vibe is always a little more gentle and kind so it’s a weird fit. Lots of fun comedy bits around the edges though so I’m glad to have finally seen it.
The Righteous Gemstones, “For I Know the Plans I Have for You” and “But Esau Ran to Meet Him”
And into season three! Introducing a new set of megachurch pastors to parallel the Gemstones–this time three apparently tight-knit siblings who can appear in public without squabbling and pulling each other’s hair–is a great move, and I’m always happy to see Stephen Dorff. And we’ve got Shea Wigham, Steve Zahn (who, by appearing alongside John Goodman, causes a mini-Treme reunion), Kristen Johnston ….
I like that the show isn’t afraid to bust up the status quo: we’re seeing the start of Eli’s “semi-retirement,” with him stepping back (but still keeping an eye on things) and letting his dysfunctional kids try to run the show. This is going about as well as anyone would expect, because even when they’re all at the point of achieving success in their individual realms, they’re awful at sharing the stage, and their constant, needy jockeying for position and applause makes everyone uncomfortable. And the show, in excellent comedic form, takes the basic, self-evident idea–people aren’t going to like this as much as they liked Eli’s tenure, not until the “kids” settle down–to absurd, glorious heights, with a simple meeting of the ministers turning into a profanity-laced, shoe-hurling extravaganza .
Love Gideon wearing his cool stunt-driver jacket over his chauffeur uniform, complete with neck brace.
I’m not too invested yet in the plotline with May-May and the cousins, but it was interesting to see the Gemstones at the prepper compound, with Zahn making a couple valid points against them–they’re performers first and preachers second, Eli commercialized Aimee-Leigh’s gift–and getting some interesting points of contrast (it was almost surreal at this point to hear an actual hymn, something meant to be sung as a community rather than watched as an audience). But also, you know, many, many guns, lots of physical violence, and an inability to let anyone break free–not exactly trivial differences, even if, as Jesse accidentally points out, they’re both still weirdo families living on compounds.
Hacks S3 – Finished very fast which speaks to the quality here, though Deborah and Kathy’s arc was resolved a little too fast for my taste. (Yet their scene in the chemical snow still made me cry, Smart and J. Smith Cameron bringing decades of history and loss to it.) Quite a few people were excited for me to watch the finale and I can see why, it’s a big array of laughs, reversals, and total betrayals, many motivated by the reality that Deborah, human as she is*, is also deeply venal and selfish, and the heartbreak of Ava recognizing this attitude extends to every single person in her life. (And that she shouldn’t BE Deborah, but she can be a little like Deborah, the fucking OWNAGE of the last scene here…) Jimmy meanwhile wins because he believes in loyalty and rewarding talent, Cliff Biff (heh) is right that luck plays into success but so does generosity: someone knowing you and extending their hand at the right time and place. Great fucking show.
Best bits: The most awkward scene possible starring Christina Hendricks seducing you. Ava choking on a cigar, something inherently funny about a tiny woman trying to look cool with a cigar and failing. Julien collapsing in fear of Marcus leaving. Marty being so genuinely happy for Deborah. “You’re lonely all the fucking time…and you’re gonna die that way.” The sheer, fiery ownage of the last scene, as I said, with Ava becoming Deborah’s true Nemesis.
*The Berkeley meeting scene could’ve been so preachy and instead it’s (1) funny and (2) Deborah acknowledging her fear, she recognizes that her jokes weren’t just unfunny and bigoted, not the hard work she espouses but easy potshots at persecuted people as well as the product of ignorance. Smart really leans into the vulnerability with “…I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing.”
Phonebank Zoom call as our red state senators want to cut our public transit by 45 FUCKING PERCENT. (If there’s violence when thousands of people can’t make their night shifts, we know who messed this up.) A lot of people are going to a midday rally next week though and I was getting confirmations. Pretty frustratingly disorganized and scrappy, including issues with writing the call script during the zoom, but felt good.
Wooo, the often arduous but necessary and much-appreciated work of resisting bullshit!
Jean Smart really kills the scene where Deborah is finally alone with her own old jokes, watching herself on screen and not laughing even a little: her face does so much there.
Mark me down as one of the people very excited for you to get to The Moment/The Line. One of the things I really appreciate about it is how simple the language is, with nothing to get in the way of the sheer ownage and recognition.
Oh I got there! Einbinder sells it so perfectly, especially how she’s steeled herself for this, but terrific writing, using an earlier plot point in a truly unexpected way while giving you that ownage. “Wouldn’t you?” (There’s also how Deborah perpetually expects Ava to do whatever she wants and my, how the tables have turned. She’s underestimated her too long.)
Whoops, I meant “one of the people who WAS very excited for you to get there.” Tenses!
I also love how Ava’s also calling Deborah on Deborah’s previous, deployed-to-hurt assertion that they’re the same deep down: it’s like, “If you really believe what you told me then, then you know what I’ll do now.”
Good reversal too of where they were left in S2, with Deborah ascendent and being cruel to be kind – now Ava’s an equal across that table.
Nothing non-urban officials hate more than public transit, good job pushing back.
Thanks, I can’t even go to the rally, but it is apparent that people are rapidly organizing – part of this too is that they keep putting off permanent transit funding and there’s at least potential for that to finally stop three years in a freakin’ row.
Damien, not Julien, Shieldboy!
Insomnia — Nolan fractures the time of one guy instead of a whole movie, this can be very effective (the windshield wiper bit late in the film) but overall the movie is pretty straightforward*. And in some ways it feels like Nolan doing Se7en, an old cynical cop and a young eager beaver team up to track down a killer who is an extreme moral solipsist. Spacey’s John Doe aligned his retribution with the Bible as cover for his self-centeredness (see the final sin) but Robin Williams is tied to his own authorship, the idea that his choices are the only ones that matter in a world of characters, and this is ultimately a lot more disturbing (and Williams is fantastic, he lets his own self-centered neediness as a performer animate his dialogue and demeanor even as he dials it down in action and bombast). The ending is pretty dopey (multiple people fail the “just shoot the fucking guy” test for Script Reaons) but up until then there is a real tension between Williams’ worldview and Pacino’s, because the former understands that the latter has already looked though his lens and found it useful. And this suggests another comparison — Pacino is very good here and very believable as a good cop who has understood his job and to some extent still does, see his breaking of people via interview and his immediate recognition of Williams as just another turd to be flushed, but his deviation from that is what happens to a certain Dutch Wagenbach without a good partner.
*with the extremely odd exception of the late-film discussion between Pacino and Tierney ending with Tierney on Pacino’s bed — did they bang? what in the fuck is that about?
Yeah, I remember watching this after Memento and it’s a solid studio movie that won’t blow a 14-year old’s mind the way that one did. But Williams is great, his soft-spoken sincerity now actively unsettling. (There’s the hard cut too when he grabs the girl, oof.)
Nice writeup, bumps it up on my list. Reminds me of my favorite scene in Mississippi Grind where Ben Mendelsohn plays the piano next to someone and, for the first time, is neither losing, facing the consequences of his loserdom, or half-assedly getting through life, but simply enjoying something he is good at. (Similarly the camera focuses on Annaleigh Tipton merely listening.)
Thanks, and I need to see Mississippi Grind. Love Mendelsohn.
It has by far the best Ryan Reynolds performance ala Adventureland – his neediness is more interesting when it’s just desperation.
Mendelsohn? Did somebody say Andor?
Great write up! One detail the movie uses for characterization is showing the longer somebody’s known Mikey, the more tired of him they are. His ex looks absolutely drained from the moment he walks in, versus Strawberry who still finds his pushiness part of his quirky charm.
Thank you, and yes, I love that too. And how every past connection he mentions, from housemates to business partners, has always ended badly. Though he’ll tell you it was through no fault of his own, of course.