Red Rocket (2021, Sean Baker) (Patreon)

73/100

Don't think it makes much difference, really, but I'd never heard of Simon Rex prior to this film, just assumed he was someone Baker found on the street or Instagram or wherever. Truly uncanny casting instinct. Like The Florida Project (minus Bobby's empathetic watchfulness), this is all id all the time, framing oft-hilarious truculence within a depressive milieu; pulling that combination off sans condescension is quite tricky, and requires a filmmaker who unmistakably adores every one of his myriad fuckups. The key insight here involves Mikey's genuine failure to recognize his own predatory/subsidiary nature, culminating in the movie stopping bizarrely cold when Lexi calls him a suitcase pimp. You can see that accusation absolutely not compute for this hustler-clown, who's spent much of the movie patiently explaining why he, the passive recipient, richly deserves his multiple AVN Best Oral awards. Red Rocket doesn't apologize for Mikey, but it does make an effort to understand him, which is how this whole art thing's supposed to work. (Glaring at you, self-righteous Twitter scolds.) Baker's starting to demonstrate real formal chops, too—the job-search montage demonstrates impressive forethought about how a flurry of setups will cut together (which you'd think would constitute baseline competence, but is rare enough in micro-budget indie films these days to leap out at me). Gotta say I didn't need the '16-election backdrop to grasp Mikey's venal nature (though at least it's less obtrusive than was Killing Them Softly Circa Late Autumn 2008), and the movie lost me a little in the home stretch, engineering a downfall for our antihero that requires him to be improbably courteous*/trusting/naïve/oblivious/stupid. Final scene's evocatively ambiguous, though—kinda the same ending as A White, White Day, actually, albeit involving a woman who's still very much alive—and the film as a whole rivals Uncut Gems for relentlessly entertaining and disturbing skeeviness. 

* For him, that is. I focused on Mikey not thinking to move his bankroll after impulsively showing Lexi where it's hidden, but my friend Jason pointed out that the whole blowup would have been averted had Mikey not chosen to announce his impending departure. And splitting without warning (or with only five minutes' warning) is exactly the kind of asshole move you'd expect from him. But Lexi and Lil need time to set their plan in motion, so he blurts it out as ungraciously as possible the night before. Feels contrived.