If God loves a trier then He must fucking worship Mikey ‘Saber’ Davies in Sean Baker’s latest movie Red Rocket. He’s a handsome, charming, reprehensible douchebag, a spray-and-pray asshole who descends on his estranged wife Lexi and her mum Lil with nothing more than a bruised face and a smile. Mikey is a ‘suitcase pimp’, a male porn star who lives off the back of the female talent. He’s got a million stories to tell and you’ll never know which ones (if any) are real. He’s the star of The Fast and Fury-Ass, a porn parody of The Fast and the Furious until that selfish bastard Paul Walker got himself killed in a car crash and fucked up Mikey’s recurring role in that franchise.
But as reprehensible as Mikey is (he’s got hundreds of subscribers to his Pornhub channel) he is irrepressible, like Tigger with a Gatling gun. He arrives with 22 dollars in his pocket and a game plan – smarm his way back into the Gulf Coast underclass, pick their bones clean and return to L.A. to have another crack at the big time. Mikey isn’t afraid to stoop to conquer as he rides around town searching for work on a bike that makes him look like he has time travelled straight out of a frame of Stand by Me. When work doesn’t materialize, Mikey hooks up with his weed connect Leondria and starts moving weight to school kids and factory workers.
Despite ourselves, we become beguiled with Mikey’s low-rent Paul Newman looks, the sleazy ease with which he hops back into Lexi’s bed (once a porn star herself), the way he regales his younger neighbour, Lonnie, with wild tales of debauchery and toxic masculinity. Mikey hails from a long line of cinematic reprehensible, despicable scumbags, hauling themselves up on the misery of others, Barry Lyndon, Ratzo Rizzo, Jimmy McGill, later Saul Goodman. But like those creeps, Mikey is played by an actor with charm and soul to burn – in this case an unlikely comeback of sorts from noughties renaissance man Simon Rex. Remember him? Yeah you know, the MTV VJ, Calvin Klein model, star of the Scary Movie franchise, and sometime parody rapper on tracks like My Dick.
Who doesn’t love a comeback? Rex’s performance as Mikey resonates all the better for the symbiotic between character and actor and the fact that Baker had Rex in mind for the role for years without him knowing. After partying hard in his heyday, Rex now lives off the grid in The Joshua Tree and has proved himself a stand-up guy for outing the British tabloids for offering him 70,000 dollars to say he slept with Meghan Markle. So, when Mikey begins to groom 17-year-old Strawberry to become the first porn actress for his fledgling ‘Sabre Entertainment’ business, we are already complicit in his heinous schemes and we already know the fate that awaits Strawberry – we only must take one look at Lexi.
Mikey says ‘the universe is on my side’ and, set against the back drop of the 2016 election, anything seems possible for the guttersnipes who emerge from Trump’s bilious campaign. His wide-eyed sense of charm and wonder conceal his ruthless pursuit of his nefarious goals. At times when Mikey is alone and quiet, we almost tip-toe into something akin to remorse, but instead, Mikey’s reactions remind us what a ratfuckbastard he is and to what extent he is willing to plumb the subterranean depths of depravity to make Mikey great again.