Red Rocket

For all the sinister undercurrents, Red Rocket is hilarious throughout.

Simon Rex gives a virtuoso performance.

Mikey is one of Baker’s most thought-through creations, and Rex brings him to life with terrifying honesty.

Mr. Rex gives a 100% phenomenal performance, starting with a bright veneer of charm that conceals only barely, then not at all, an unmoored soul.

It’s no surprise that [Rex] gives Mikey everything he’s got. What is a surprise is how much he’s got to give. The performance is riveting until, like the movie, it just becomes too much.

The movie may want you to see the best of us in the dingiest of places. But you’re as delusional as Mikey Saber if you think it will avert its eyes from showing us the worst of us as well.

The film, whose title may or may not refer to a slang term for a dog’s erection, often teeters between compassion and something that feels perilously close to cultural voyeurism.

Another exceptional delivery by the master realist Sean Baker. Highly enjoyable as usual, due to Baker's brilliant techniques of realism, which is always employed whether it be Tangerine, Florida Project etc... Using non-actors filming things in real places and not sets. It all makes for very candid watching, which makes the story all the more relatable and charming. Baker nails this one! I feel it is his best yet. This film is so easy to love. Baker is the 21st century John Cassavetes on digital. The truest of realism, sometimes so awkward it's cringeworthy... but such is life, at times.

Red Rocket is the kind of movie that gives us some great performances (Simon Rex is brilliant) but ultimately isn't all that interesting. It runs 30 minutes too long and can be pretty uneventful and repetitive at times. It can be a challenge to sit through tbh.

(Mauro Lanari) Edward Hopper's "Automat" ('27) between "Lolita" ('55-'62) and "Boogie Nights" ('97). 5 minutes of standing ovation in Cannes: just associate the degraded, squalid, peripheral rural marginality with Trump and you're done.

bad [ bad ] adjective, worse, worst;(Slang) bad·der, bad·dest for 36. not good in any manner or degree.

In this raunchy indie comedy, and directed by Sean Baker ('The Florida Project'), Simon Rex stars as Mikey Saber, a washed up porn star who returns to his small Texas hometown in hopes of getting by and starting anew. There, he encounters his estranged wife, drug dealers, job-hiring difficulty, and a potential new romantic interest in a young 17-yr-old donut shop girl. Baker's the kind of director who specializes in what I like to refer to as "white-trash cinema", films that specialize in detailing the lives of the lower class and ghetto small towns and the poor sleazy people that live there. He did this with 'The Florida Project' as well, and he does it again here to somewhat amusing effect. The film starts off humorous and intriguing enough, but the further it goes on, the more trashy, sleazy, and all-around smutty and gratuitous it becomes to the point of no return. I couldn't have cared last about any of these hicks, and while Rex undeniably gives a confident, albeit rather cocky (no pun intended) lead performance, even he's near impossible to root for or sympathize with, causing trouble and BS everywhere he goes throughout the film from start to finish. And I'm sorry, but watching him try to groom a hardly legal 17-yr-old girl into a relationship with him and into the porn industry did not sit right with me at all! The story is wandering and aimless and just feels all-around pointless and like a whole lot of nothing by the time the credits rolled. Overall, it's a complete sleazeball of a film with zero redeemable characters and an excessively smutty story. No thanks!