Rhyme the Rhyme Well: ‘Red Rocket’
A terrific character study about a terrible person closes the loop.
NEW STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This newsletter aggressively spoils things.
You often hear about how good stories rhyme, which is one of those pretty pieces of writing advice or observation that sounds very brilliant1. Like all writing advice or “craft” proclamations (see: Write What Your Know) it’s both useful and useless, because we writers love injecting poetic bullshit into everything2. What does “rhyme” mean, exactly? A lot of writers seem to think it means your last image/scene should map directly to your first, but of course that’s simplistic3. Rhyming in terms of writing can mean a lot of different approaches.
Take Red Rocket, the semi-excellent movie written by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch and directed by Baker. This extended character study focuses on Mikey (Simon Rex), a washed-up porn star who returns to Texas City, Texas in sad shape4. He’s suffered a beating, carries no luggage, and finds himself begging his estranged wife and mother-in-law for mercy, which they eventually grant by allowing him to sleep on the couch.
Initially you might think Red Rocket is a story focused on setting—Texas City is rendered in dense detail, giving the story a sense of concrete reality. Texas City has a skyline so dominated by the oil industry that time is measured in terms of new smokestacks, and its collection of ragged yards and stripmall architecture feels very real5. But very quickly you realize that the strong sense of place is just a bonus: This is a story about a character, and that character is a sociopath. And there’s a rhyme in here, but it’s perfectly done.
Homeless. Suitcase. Pimp.
Initially, Mikey seems harmless enough: He’s obviously desperate when he shows up at his ex-wife Lexi’s (Bree Elrod) house where she lives with her mother Lili (Brenda Deiss), but he seems aware of this. He begs, he goes looking for work, he helps out around the house. While the circumstances of his arrival were sketchy AF, he at least seems self-aware enough to lean into gratitude6.
But this is slowly revealed as a sociopath’s strategery. Mikey is a straight-up bad person, but he’s got the classic superficial charisma and charm of a sociopath7: He’s obsequious and overtly polite, working hard to make the people he needs feel like he respects them8. When he initially arrives at Lexi and Lili’s home, he refuses to accept her rejection, persistently worming his way in with declarations of servitude and desperation—you almost like him here, when he’s so desperate. When he heads out to find a job, you feel like he’s doing what he promised he would do. When he tells people he used to be a porn star, directing them to his clips on Pornhub9, you think he’s just clearing up an inevitable confusion. And when he looks up the drug matriarch he used to deal for, you think it’s just because he needs an income.
Slowly, Mikey is revealed as a real ripe asshole. All his polite bullshit is just a way of inserting himself—all his conversation is about himself, all he can talk about is how he’s thisclose to a comeback. Once he starts making some money from his pot-dealing gig, he begins treating Lexi—who, it’s made clear, he treated really, really terribly the first time around—really deplorably. He befriends their next-door neighbor, the slightly off Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), solely to get free rides around town. And worst of all, he begins grooming 17-year-old Raylee (Suzanna Son), cynically manipulating her into a sexual relationship10 with a clear intention of recruiting her into the porn business, with himself as her manager. Mikey makes it pretty clear that he sees Raylee as his ticket back into he good life back in Los Angeles. He’s awful—everything he does underneath that facade of white-boy politeness is all about making things better for Mikey. It’s a terrific character study.
But it’s the ending that brings it all home, because it rhymes in all the best ways.
It Ain’t No Lie
Mikey’s downfall is both slow and sudden. A master manipulator, everything seems to be going his way, but Lexi suspects he’s cheating on her, and her hurt and anger at him about the way he’s treated her is palpable. When he’s partly responsible for a deadly accident on the highway, he urges Lonnie to take all the heat, which he does. Mikey can sense things are about to take a turn, and with a roach’s survival instinct he arranges to flee back to Los Angeles with Raylee. She’s an idiot kid who’s in love with him. But to Mikey, she’s just a meal ticket.
And then, just when it seems like Mikey’s going ton get away with it all, the hammer drops: Lexi calls the drug queenpin Mikey’s been dealing for and gets Mikey canceled. Mikey might be from Texas City, but he’s no longer part of Texas City—he’s an outsider, but Lexi and Lili are locals. He’s rousted out of bed, his money is confiscated, and he finds himself running naked in the street. He’s evicted from Lexi’s house with just a garbage bag full of clothes and $200 to his name.
We never learn what happened to Mikey before the narrative began—why he showed up in his hometown bruised and beaten, broke and desperate—but at the end it’s easy to imagine it was just like this: Mikey bullshitted and charmed his way until everyone caught on11, and then he was forcibly evicted from some crappy apartment, taking a beating in the process. We don’t know that story, but we know that it likely parallels this story. This is a pattern Mikey has been through before. The only difference is that as he gets older and more washed out—he’s a former porn star without a dime to his name who has to pop Viagra to have sex as it is, and that’s only going to get worse—the loop is going to get shorter, and shorter, until eventually he chokes on it12.
In other words it’s a rhyme even though we don’t get to hear the first part. You’ll just have to use you’re imagination, which makes it sing even louder.
Of course, I live about 5 minutes from my own hometown, so if I ever went back there it wouldn’t be very dramatic. Although it’s entirely possible I’d be arrested the moment I crossed the city line, for ... reasons13.
NEXT WEEK: Fallout nails the apocalypse.
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The trick is, any writing advice sounds brilliant. For example, I often tell people that they have to imagine their characters without pants in order to get the right tone in their novel, and I can tell from their faces that at least 3 people always take me seriously.
Says the man who routinely writes 1,000 words about TV shows he watched after drinking half a bottle of Pinot Noir and eating 65 tacos.
Finally, something I am an expert in: Being simple.
Rex has that naturally janky physicality that works perfectly here: He’s lean, but in more of a “living on drugs and adrenaline” way than a “healthy lifestyle” way.
Having been to Texas, it also feels very real how literally everything is 1,000 miles away. The first time I went there and someone said “let’s go to the grocery store” and people began packing supplies for the ride I knew I was in trouble.
As I have slowly learned throughout my entire life, self-awareness is charming. Whatever I am doing on a regular basis is not.
Ears: Burning.
I am polite to everyone because I assume you are all insane killers who will bite off my ear if I forget to say “Excuse me.”
For some reason when I direct people to freelance articles I wrote about raising chickens in your backyard, no one is impressed.
Raylee’s enthusiasm for a sexual relationship with a man who looks like an Axe body spray can was magically transformed into a person is the most horrifying aspect of this story.
So far no one has caught on to my bullshit, and thank god, because it takes a village to keep Jeff alive.
To be fair, that pretty much describes life in general. Now I need a drink.
Any time The Duchess and I find ourselves in Jersey City I immediately start giving her the “Jeff Got Beaten Up Here and Here is Where He Drank Blackberry Brandy on a Streetcorner” tour, which she hates.
Blackberry brandy? You monster.