Red Rocket (2021)

Sean Baker returns to the American margin, this time to Texas City, where the refineries hum and the donut shop stays open late. His cast is assembled the way he always assembles them: locals, non-professionals, faces pulled off the street and handed a camera. The faces are unfamiliar and the accents are real, and nobody is introduced as a representative of anything. The result is texture of a high order. Simon Rex, cast against the memory of his own youth, plays Mikey Saber with a gregariousness that curdles slowly.

Mikey is a suitcase pimp, a washed-up adult performer who sleeps on his estranged wife's couch and sets his sights on a seventeen-year-old named Strawberry. The film declines to punish him. It also declines to forgive him. That refusal generated argument in the post-MeToo discourse, with critics asking whether the camera's neutrality amounted to complicity. It does not. The camera is not neutral. It is enamored, which is worse and more honest. Mikey is a study in male predation, not a feminist reckoning with it, and the film knows the difference.

Where the film lands on the ledger of contemporary social consciousness is a modest place. The Black characters who populate Mikey's drug trade exist without commentary, which is to say they exist as people. The economic desperation is rendered with care but never converts into a thesis about the wealthy. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no invitation to feel virtuous. Baker's interest is in a man who fails upward and a country that lets him. The film is amoral the way a documentary about weather is amoral. It reports. The report is bleak, and the bleakness is the point.