Film review: Red Rocket a blackly comic account of one man's career as a porn star

Mikey has all the morals of a honey badger but it is very difficult to dislike him

★★★★☆

There’s nothing subtle about the Freudian allusion in the title of Red Rocket (18s), which is the soubriquet employed by Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) in his career as a porn star.

Arriving back in the rural Texas town he left some years previously, Mikey finds that very little has changed: his wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) still hates him, and the town is still a drab, dusty one-horse burg. Nothing daunted, Mikey gets busy, and soon the prodigal son is dealing weed for Leondria (Judy Hill) and wooing Strawberry (Suzanna Son), a high school teenager who works at the local doughnut shop.

Written by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch, with Baker ( The Florida Project) directing, Red Rocket is something of a high-wire affair: it’s very difficult to dislike Mikey, who hustles around town on a BMX bike and seems possessed of boundless energy, enthusiasm and good-ol’-boy charm.

And yet Mikey has all the morals of a honey badger: even as he worms his way back into his wife’s heart and bed, sponging off Lexi and her mother Lil (Brenda Dreiss), he’s grooming the impressionable Strawberry to travel with him to Hollywood as his way back into the seamy world of porn.

Set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election, and offering a glimpse as to why Donald Trump’s demagoguery could very easily appeal to people who are clinging to solvency by their fingertips, Red Rocket is a blackly comic account of the hapless Mikey’s attempts to con the world into believing he’s the real deal.

Simon Rex is terrific as the grifter with limitless self-confidence and virtually no self-awareness, and there’s brilliant support from the cynical Bree Elrod, the wide-eyed Suzanna Son and the superbly laconic Brenda Dreiss.

(cinema release)