![]() Maybe we’re supposed to see affinities between Mikey and the eventual winner - to ponder once again how some men get away with so much, and sort through our possible reactions of envy, admiration or disgust. Nobody in the movie talks about politics, but the candidates’ voices and images leak from radios and television sets, creating a hazy aura of relevance. Mikey’s misadventures take place in the summer of 2016, as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump accept the nominations of their parties and square off for November. The vivid sense of place - you can’t fake Texas City - is embellished with a specific time stamp. It’s funny and abrasive, but also coy and, in the end, a bit tedious. “Red Rocket,” the nonjudgmental portrait of a narcissistic predator, is a rougher piece of work. The movies, though, find dignity in the most abject circumstances, and bathe their characters in sometimes surprising warmth. The aspiring actresses in “Starlet,” the transgender hustlers in “Tangerine,” the half-feral children of “The Florida Project” - all of them are exposed to danger and humiliation. In his previous movies, Baker has observed strivers and dreamers on the margins of respectability with an eye that could be prurient and skeptical, but also compassionate. Son, who has undeniable star potential, helps keep the story perched on the boundary between sweetness and sleaze. Her interest intensifies when she finds out about his work history, and he starts to see her as a porn star in the making, his ticket back to the big time. Strawberry, who is 17, responds to Mikey’s flirting out of boredom and curiosity. Lonnie is eager for inside dirt on the porn world. The major exceptions are Lonnie and Strawberry, both in their different ways in thrall to Mikey’s celebrity and susceptible to his charisma. ![]() These are not mutually exclusive categories. (The mostly nonprofessional actors are good sports and decent company.) There are some who do business with him, some who have sex with him, and some who punch him, kick him, threaten him with murder or force him to run naked through the nighttime streets. The people he meets in the movie are similarly divided. What they find is evidence of a long and successful career in pornography under a suggestive pseudonym. “Google me,” Mikey says to potential employers and new acquaintances. In a handful of early scenes in Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket,” we learn quite a bit about this guy, who is played with antic, uninhibited verve by the onetime MTV V.J. ![]() That sounds both grandiose and ridiculous, but shameless, preposterous self-aggrandizement is Mikey’s M.O. Before long he is installed on Lil’s couch (and later, in Lexi’s bed), using their modest yellow bungalow as a base of operations as he lays siege to Texas City by bicycle. Still, there is something about Mikey that wears down her resistance. Lexi, who hasn’t seen Mikey in a while, challenges the idea that absence makes the heart grow fonder, ordering him off the property. That much is clear as soon as he saunters up to the door of the house where his estranged wife, Lexi, lives with her mother, Lil, and their dog, Sophie. Even without a suitcase, he’s clearly hauling a lot of baggage. Mikey arrives in Texas City, Tex., a Gulf Coast oil-and-gas town, with not much more than the tank top on his back, $22 in his pocket and bruises on his face and torso.
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