Porn star’s small-town comedown

Red Rocket, centres on a down-on-his-luck male porn star, screen name Mikey Saber, who returns to his home town in Texas, bruised, broke and full of bullshit.

Simon Rex and Suzanna Son in the film Red Rocket, directed by Sean Baker.

Red Rocket (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★½

The independent filmmaker Sean Baker asks us to spend time with people on the margins of American life, such as an illegal Chinese immigrant (Take Out, 2004), a transgender sex worker (Tangerine, 2015), a single mother who turns to prostitution (The Florida Project, 2017).

His new film, Red Rocket, centres on a down-on-his-luck male porn star, screen name Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), who returns to his home town in Texas, bruised, broke and full of bullshit.

He’s late 40s, handsome and charming, if in a narcissistic way. He’s been in Los Angeles for near 20 years, making about 2000 adult movies. There’s a neat joke about one of them, The Fast and the Fury Ass.

He talks himself into the house rented by his wife Lexi (Bree Elrod), herself a former porn star, and her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss).

When they ask why “Mr Hollywood” has left that star-studded place, he says, “The world f..ked me. What can I say?”

The world will continue to do that over the course of this 130-minute movie, and it’s hard to say he doesn’t deserve it. The more important question is, how much harm does this self-absorbed man do to others, and how much of it is deliberate?

This question becomes pivotal when he meets a 17-year-girl (newcomer Suzanna Son) who works at a doughnut shop. She calls herself Strawberry and he takes an intense interest in her.

The performances are strong, especially from Son as the high school girl who made me think of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. The superbly shot final scene takes us right into this dark place.

There are some funny moments, especially in the early scenes where Mike applies for minimum wage jobs around the town, where the main business is an oil refinery.

As he’s a porn star, let’s deal with one obvious question: yes, we do see his “junk”, as Lil calls it, and, as one potential employer jokes, he does seem “over-qualified”. There’s an interesting backstory there, involving the star’s first films, which those curious enough can find via his Wikipedia page.

However, this film, set during the presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, is more drama than comedy. It has similarities with Chloe Zhao’s Oscar-winner Nomadland, including the combination of professional and non-professional actors. It’s about the American underclass, ignored, bitter, desperate and, when the opportunity arises, full of fight.

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The Tender Bar (M)
Amazon Prime
★★★½

George Clooney is one of three people who have received Oscar nominations in six different categories. The other two are his Mexican contemporary Alfonso Cuaron and the almost certainly deceased (if one ignores the waiting-in-a-freezer theories) Walt Disney.

He is behind the camera in his new film, The Tender Bar, which makes me think of his best work as a director. I vote for the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck, for which he received two Oscar nominations: best director and best adapted screenplay.

He won neither (Ang Lee took the first for Brokeback Mountain and Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco the second for Crash, which also was named best picture), but he did win best supporting actor for a different film, Syriana.

The Tender Bar is based on a 2005 coming-of-age memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer JR Moehringer. Clooney did not do the adaptation, leaving that to novelist and screenwriter William Monahan, who has his own Oscar, for writing Martin Scorsese’s 2006 crime epic The Departed.

This 104-minute movie is in two parts that sometimes overlap. In 1973, 11-year-old JR (newcomer Daniel Ranieri, who is wonderful) and his mother Dorothy (Lily Rabe), evicted from their home, move into her parents’ place on Long Island, New York.

The house is run down and crowded, which the boy likes, especially because it means he can hang out with his Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck), a self-educated man who reads a lot of books and runs a bar called Dickens.

The moments between JR and Uncle Charlie are full of tenderness, as the title suggests, and humour. Affleck is quietly brilliant as this father figure who says what he thinks, but always with love. As it happens, Clooney’s second Oscar was as a producer on the best picture winner in 2013, Argo, directed by and starring Affleck.

JR’s real father, a radio DJ (Max Martini), pops up now and then. A scene where the boy waits on the doorstep for Dad to turn up and take him to a baseball game is deeply affecting.

In 1986, the older JR (Tye Sheridan) heads to Yale. His mother wants him to be a lawyer but he wants to be a writer. He heads back to Long Island whenever he can to see Uncle Charlie and seek his advice, including on romance.

“Always choose philosophy,’’ Uncle Charlie advises when JR is deciding his courses. “You’ll always do well in that class because there are no right answers.”

That’s a fair summation of the lives of the people in this film, which is not perfect but has its beautiful moments, including the worth-waiting-for end credits sequence, which returns to 1973 and a trip to the beach.

Daniel Ranieri and Ben Affleck in The Tender Bar

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The 355 (M)
In cinemas
★★★

Women have been spying on us for quite a while. Emma Peel of The Avengers (Diana Rigg in the 60s TV series, Uma Thurman in the 1998 movie) springs to mind, as do all of Charlie’s Angels. In more recent times, it would be unwise to double cross Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde.

So when Jessica Chastain, making the 2019 film X-Men: Dark Phoenix with director Simon Kinberg, floated the idea of a female-led espionage film, she must have known that it would need something different.

She (as star and producer) and the director have tried to do just that in The 355, an action-adventure centred on a group of female spies, and it more or less works.

The title comes from the code name used by an anonymous female American spy during the American Revolution. The point is, she had a name and a life.

So do the agents from different countries who, after initial argy bargy, decide to join forces to save the world from a tech device that can knock planes out of the sky, take over nuclear power plants and so on.

In the wrong hands it would start World War III. And the wrong hands are closing around it.

Mace (Chastain) is CIA, Khadijah (Lupita Nyong’o) is MI6 and Marie (Diane Kruger) is with the German equivalent. Graciela (Penelope Cruz, in one of her best recent roles) is a psychologist with the Colombian secret service.

Mace and Marie are alone, but even so there are people they care about. Khadijah is in love with her live-in boyfriend. Graciela has a husband and two young sons.

It is these personal connections that will be put to the test. In the best scene, the choice becomes simple to ask, impossible to answer: save the world or save your loved ones?

This 124-minute movie is fast-paced, well-acted and asks some interesting questions about where one’s loyalty lies.

When Mace, talking about family and children, mentions that “James Bond doesn’t have to deal with real life”, Khadijah replies, “James Bond always ends up alone.”

Jessica Chastain in The 355