Red Rocket (2021)

Red Rocket is the kind of movie that feels alive in your hands: sunbaked, restless, and razor-observed, a small-town American odyssey told with Sean Baker’s gift for finding humanity in the gutters and neon corners. Simon Rex gives a startlingly magnetic performance as Mikey Saber—funny, infuriating, strangely charismatic—so convincing you’ll catch yourself rooting for him even as the film keeps your conscience tapped on the shoulder. The vibe is bittersweet and high-energy, mixing scrappy humor with a creeping sense of consequence, all captured with Baker’s vivid, street-level authenticity. Fair warning: it’s sexually explicit and deliberately uncomfortable at times, but if you can meet it on its own terms, it’s a brash, unforgettable character ride that lingers like heat off asphalt.

Red Rocket is clearly trying to be a sunbaked, darkly funny character study about an irredeemable hustler clawing for relevance, and Sean Baker nails the lived-in Texas setting with a raw, almost documentary feel. The problem is it’s a long hangout with a guy who’s charming in the way a con artist is charming, and if you don’t enjoy watching selfish behavior pile up without much moral hand-holding, it can feel grimy and repetitive rather than insightful. The story also wanders on purpose, which some will read as realism and others as meandering padding. If you can handle explicit sex, nudity, and nonstop profanity, Simon Rex’s performance is the main reason to stick around; if you’re looking for a tighter plot or a protagonist you can root for, this is going to test your patience.