Mikey Saber returns to his hometown of Texas after years of pornstar career in Los Angeles. He is not really welcome there… Without money, without a job, he has to go back to live with his ex-wife and his mother-in-law… To pay his rent, he resumes his little schemes but a meeting will give him the hope for a new beginning.

The size girded with a giant and pink donut, a naked man parades on the poster of Red Rocket. Singular vision which encapsulates quite correctly the sarcastic tone of a film recounting the pitiful return to the country of a fallen star of the pornography industry. Obviously, his presence is incongruous in the desolate landscape of a corner of Texas, when Trump will soon take the presidency. The film obviously plays on the contrast between this environment where the population survives in precariousness and the flamboyant but above all narcissistic and manipulative personality of its hero, as ridiculous as it is toxic. The misadventures of the former stallion are treated with a devastating irony, nourished by unfiltered dialogues and delirious situations, although some flirt dangerously with the scabrous. But like its main character, the film dares bad taste with certain aplomb, as if to poke fun at puritanical America without forgetting to attack it, but it’s a constant of independent cinema, at the famous American dream, now well withered. Thanks to a swift editing (who can find the film too long?), the frenetic pace leaves little time to breathe and, ultimately, the pathetic side of the lives of the protagonists of Red Rocket, far from be watered down, acquires a growing truth, accentuated by the naturalistic play of actors with undeniable authenticity. The so-called Simon Rex, himself a former gay porn actor, is staggering in the main role, that of an unsavory individual that he manages to make endearing. Even without squatting donut holes.