Red Rock­et

Every­body used to want a piece of Mikey Saber, but not so much in 2016. Don­ald Trump is foam­ing at the mouth, des­per­ate to con­vince a frag­ile coun­try to swear him in as pres­i­dent, while Mikey is sweet­ly bang­ing on his estranged wife’s front door (well, they’re tech­ni­cal­ly still mar­ried) as he returns home to small­town Texas, tail between his legs and a fire in his belly.

There were prob­a­bly count­less hus­tlers like Mikey in that place and at that time, but this one comes from the mind of film­mak­er Sean Bak­er, America’s sharpest chron­i­cler of life on the fringes. He spots untapped tal­ent with fever­ish excite­ment, and places his stars in a lime­light that would be refused to them by main­stream cinema.

Scary Movie star, MTV VJ and one-time adult film actor Simon Rex takes the reins as Mikey, with a mer­cu­r­ial, mile-a-minute per­for­mance that switch­es from can­dour to mal­ice to arro­gance to nar­cis­sism to ambi­tion and a lit­tle bit of love, and all with­out break­ing a sweat.

Rex is incan­des­cent as Mikey as he shuf­fles his feet in the dead-end town that shut him out after he aban­doned them to make it big as a porn star in LA. He’s back for rea­sons that aren’t entire­ly clear, but he needs two things: some cash; and a good lay. What makes the char­ac­ter so deli­cious is his self-per­cep­tion, which see­saws con­stant­ly between delu­sion and moments of harsh clarity.

There are so many laughs in Rex’s laser-focused deliv­ery of sales­man-type lines about just how many trans­ferrable skills he has gained from being filmed hav­ing sex, as well as the deeply uncom­fort­able pup­py-dog schtick he pulls on 17-year-old Donut Hole work­er Straw­ber­ry (Tik­Tok star Suzan­na Son) to get her into bed and make her a star.

Bak­er nev­er los­es sight of just how dis­agree­able Mikey is – his irri­tat­ing charm is not up for debate, but it is also fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong. There’s an empa­thy for his wife Lexi and her moth­er Lil (Bree Elrod and Bren­da Deiss, both non-actors and wild­ly enter­tain­ing with their sear­ing bull­shit detec­tors) as well as Son as the sick­ly-sweet pin­up type who wants to grow up and get out in the exact same way that Mikey does. And in doing so, she ful­ly har­ness­ing her bur­geon­ing sex­u­al­i­ty as a tick­ing time-bomb that only she knows how to detonate.

These strange rela­tion­ships are framed with glee­ful, ball­sy imper­fec­tion by Bak­er, while Drew Daniels’ hyper-sat­u­rat­ed cin­e­matog­ra­phy makes Mikey’s ice-blue stare and the acid-green grass of this sleepy town feel like a par­tic­u­lar­ly potent fever dream. Then there’s the crash zooms that turn a water­side quick­ie into a cat­a­clysmic comedic event.

There’s a won­der­ful­ly mis­chie­vous qual­i­ty to the whole thing that can only be the result of fas­tid­i­ous design. Every gar­ish nee­dle drop (best use of NSYNC’s ​‘Bye Bye Bye’ this side of the mil­len­ni­um) and smash cut (that’s no inter­rup­tion, it’s a polit­i­cal state­ment) adds anoth­er brick to the wall of Baker’s grow­ing empire of mis­fits. Vibrant, wicked and wel­com­ing, he is putting these peo­ple on the map like nobody else.

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