Red Rocket

Mikey, a pornographic actor whose career is over, comes back broke from Los Angeles to his small Texas hometown and moves into the house of the wife he walked out on. Before long he starts pursuing Strawberry, a seventeen-year-old working at a donut shop. Sean Baker directed and wrote it with Chris Bergoch. Simon Rex leads, and the part came as a return after his own career decline. Suzanna Son plays Strawberry in her first film. It was shot in Texas City from October to November 2020 under strict pandemic protocols. Baker worked on 16mm with a crew of ten and mostly non-professional actors, on a 1.1 million dollar budget. It premiered at Cannes in July 2021, opened in limited release that December and grossed 2.3 million dollars worldwide. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 90 percent, with critics praising Rex's magnetic performance. The National Board of Review named it among the ten best films of 2021, and Rex took Best Actor from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and at the Independent Spirit Awards. The most argued-about thing is the subject itself: Mikey's relationship with a seventeen-year-old and how the film regards it. Who it is for: viewers who like Baker's films set at the edges of America. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the moral framing indefensible. Several critics raised exactly that, and the film does not answer it directly.