Red Rocket is a 2021 American black comedy drama film directed by Sean Baker, who co-wrote it with Chris Bergoch.

After a two day busride and with $22 on him, he arrives at the modest home of his estranged wife and fellow ex-pornstar, Lexi, to whom he is still married on paper, and her mother, Lil, begging them to let him stay.

Over the course of the day, Mikey has several job interviews, but due to the long gap in his resume and his fame as an adult film actor, nobody hires him.

Mikey repeatedly tries to persuade Strawberry to travel with him to Los Angeles to pursue a career in pornography, which he plans on managing and which is his way back into the business.

That night, Lexi and Lil convince Leondria to send her adult children, June and her brothers, to seize the $3,000 that Mikey earned from selling her pot.

The low $1.1 million budget that the film was able to secure forced Baker to abandon a larger project and devote himself to Red Rocket.

[9] Rex drove to Texas to avoid post-flight quarantine rules relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, as filming was set to begin in three days.

[9] David Rooney, writing for the Hollywood Reporter, referred to the casting of Rex as a "winking joke" as he had starred in solo masturbation videos for a gay pornography company before establishing himself in his career.

Rodriguez, who had been a regular at the Donut Hole location which was near the plant she worked at before she was laid off, was walking her dog when Baker pulled over to ask her to audition.

[15][16] Red Rocket was shot on 16 mm film by an Arriflex 16SR3 camera with Panavision 1.44x Auto Panatars, Zeiss Super Speed, Iscorama 54 and Canon Lenses.

[25] Baker stated that in Red Rocket he wanted to pay homage to "Italian eroticism" and sexploitation films by directors from the 1970s like Fernando Di Leo and Umberto Lenzi.

[28] Red Rocket had its world premiere in competition at the 74th Cannes Film Festival on July 14, 2021,[29] where it received a five minute standing ovation.

[30] It also screened at film festivals in Deauville,[31] Hamburg,[32] London,[33] Mill Valley,[34] Miskolc,[35] New York,[36] Telluride,[37] Rome,[38] Nagpur, San Sebastián[39] and Vancouver.

The website's consensus reads: "Led by Simon Rex's magnetic performance, Red Rocket is another vibrant, ground-level look at modern American life from director/co-writer Sean Baker.

[49] In Deadline Hollywood, Todd McCarthy wrote that "[e]ven before much happens, the sense of a very specific location and cultural mindset [in Red Rocket] is very intense."

He praised both Baker and lead Simon Rex for their "tremendous energy" and said the film "feels as creatively pure as a novel by a kid just out of college.

"[50] Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com, on the other hand, described it as a "rambling 130-minute film", calling the middle section "wherein Mikey ensnares [the] freckle-faced 17-year-old donut shop employee...

"[10] Said Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian: "With Red Rocket, Sean Baker has given us an adult American pastoral, essentially a comedy, and another study of tough lives at the margin, close in spirit to his lo-fi breakthrough Tangerine.

Seitz of RogerEbert.com concluded that Red Rocket is "the least of the list" of Baker and Bergoch's "impressive library of realistic movies about the rainbow coalition of the American underclass", and went on to question moments in the sexually graphic Red Rocket where, "if the filmmakers aren't exactly endorsing their protagonist's middle-aged, borderline pedo-pimp obsession with Strawberry, they're not being as rigorous about mediating it as they should.

"[51] Brianna Zigler in Gawker responded by defending the film's portrayal of a morally objectionable protagonist: [T]he world is not a comfortable place, and it's often rigged in favor of guys like Mikey Saber.