Blind Spots: Before his 4 Oscars, Sean Baker made 'Tangerine' and 'Red Rocket'

I thought I’d try something new, or new to me at least. Despite all my years of watching films, it has been impossible to keep up with everything. There are celebrated titles by important filmmakers that have passed me by, as well as some major pop cultural touchstones, either because they were before my time or I just didn’t have the time. I’d like to do some catching up now, so I’ve decided to chronicle that in a recurring “Blind Spots” series that I will add to periodically.

I thought I’d start with a filmmaker of the moment, Sean Baker, possibly the unlikeliest person ever to win four Oscars. He swept the awards a few months ago with Anora, a gritty indie screwball sex comedy about a stripper (Best Actress winner Mikey Madison) who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch. Baker won Best Picture as a producer of one of the most idiosyncratic films ever awarded by the Motion Picture Academy. He also won for directing, writing, and editing, making him the first individual ever to win four times for a single movie.

I liked Anora. I also liked the other film he made that got the attention of the Oscars, 2017’s The Florida Project, which received just a single nomination for Willem Dafoe’s supporting performance. In both cases I was more ambivalent than the general critical consensus, which was outright adoration — Florida Project scored 92 on MetaCritic, Anora scored 91. The latter film also won the grand prize, the Palme d’Or, at the Cannes Film Festival. But the two films were nothing if not bold — brash, unvarnished, and loud bordering on shrill, but bold. So I wanted to check out two films of his that I missed out on, which also received acclaim but didn’t make the Oscars: 2015’s Tangerine and 2021’s Red Rocket. (SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR BOTH FILMS)

Tangerine is a … comedy, I guess? It’s hard to tell with Baker sometimes. Famously shot using iPhones, it stars Kitana Kiki Rodriguez as Sin-Dee Rella, a transgender sex worker who is fresh out of jail and learns from her best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) that her boyfriend and pimp Chester (James Ransone) cheated on her while she was behind bars. Her mission: to find Chester and this other woman and fuck their shit up. That’s the plot, but it’s not really what Tangerine is about. As Sin-Dee embarks on her vengeful quest, the film reveals what day-to-day life is like for poor sex workers with limited options. It’s set on Christmas Eve, which reminds me of how The Florida Project was about Florida poverty in the shadow of Disney World: on an occasion known for celebration, Baker centers the hardscrabble lives that are normally kept out of view.

The thing is, though, this isn’t a valorizing portrait of poverty. Nobody suffers nobly. Frankly, Sin-Dee is a hot mess. She’s rash, impulsive, aggressive, abrasive. She never lets good sense get in the way of a terrible idea. I wouldn’t describe her as particularly likable. It’s rather frustrating to be around her, actually, for me and Alexandra alike. Sin-Dee makes a scene everywhere she goes as she searches for Chester and his side piece, causing so much drama that Alexandra eventually leaves. But while Alexandra keeps a cooler head under these circumstances, she’s got fight in her too, as we see when she wrestles a john for money that he refuses to pay her. It’s hard out here on these streets, and you’ve got to scrape for every dollar and challenge every indignity.

Alexandra eventually encounters Razmik (Karren Karagulian, who also memorably appears in Anora), an Armenian cab driver and a regular client she can trust and rely on. Compared to her previous john, it seems almost romantic when Razmik performs oral sex on her in a car wash and pays for her company; he got what he wanted and gives her what she needs. It was a pleasure doing business with you. Along the way Alexandra also distributes flyers to her friends on the street advertising that she will be singing at a local bar. And it’s a testament to the strength of their friendship that even after Sin-Dee finds the woman she’s looking for, Dinah (Mickey O'Hagan), and drags her through the streets, she makes sure to attend Alexandra’s performance — with Dinah in tow.

It all leads to an unlikely confrontation at a doughnut shop. Sin-Dee finds Chester. Razmik finds Alexandra; he’s disappointed to have missed her performance. Then Razmik’s mother-in-law finds him with the pimp and prostitutes and beckons his wronged wife to come join them. It’s an absurd ten-car pileup of a scene, though I don’t mean that negatively. It’s the film’s comedic peak, though the real climax comes immediately after, when Chester reveals that he also slept with Alexandra behind Sin-Dee’s back. That betrayal lands a lot more quietly on Sin-Dee, and cuts more deeply. It’s an extinction-level event for their friendship, but then Sin-Dee is humiliated by a car full of young men who yell slurs at her and throw urine in her face. Alexandra is there by her side. The final scene between them speaks most eloquently of the durability of their relationship. At a laundromat with Sin-Dee’s wig and clothes in the dryer, Alexandra lets her borrow her wig. A subtle gesture, but without the accoutrements of their womanhood, they are both incredibly vulnerable, yet see each other truly. This was their love story all along, forged through struggle, bad decisions, nasty consequences, and deep need.

In contrast, I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out of Red Rocket, whose protagonist makes Sin-Dee look sin-free. Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) is a washed up porn star who, down on his luck, returns to his small Texas town where he tries to reconcile with his wife Lexi (Bree Elrod). And by reconcile, I mean that he shows up on her doorstep unannounced looking for a place to crash. The middle-aged man has delusions of returning to the big time — he brags about his three AVN Awards for Best Oral. When he meets 17-year-old Raylee (Suzanna Son) at a doughnut shop run by Ms. Phan (Shih-Ching Tsou, who also played the doughnut shop proprietor in Tangerine), he is immediately drawn to her and eventually sees her as his ticket back to stardom. Thus begins his mission to groom this teenager and turn her into a porn star.

Mikey, as you might have already gathered, is a piece of shit. He weasels his way back into Lexi’s bed, then badmouths her behind her back to their neighbor Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), who listens credulously to Mikey’s self-aggrandizing stories. He cruelly puts her down when she asks him to help her win back custody of her child — he obviously has no interest in co-parenting — and he gaslights her about all the time he’s been spending with Raylee. Then he abandons Lonnie after they cause a multi-car pileup on the highway; once he’s sure he’s in the clear from that, he convinces Raylee to come to Los Angeles with him to start her porn career and tells Lexi that he’s leaving her high and dry — again. Mikey has a comeuppance, sort of, as he’s stripped of his drug dealing money and exiled from the town, but he doesn’t seem particularly humbled by this. He shows up at Raylee’s door and imagines her standing there in a red bikini. The end.

I’ve described what happens in Red Rocket, but I’m not sure exactly what it’s about. There isn’t really a character arc to speak of; Mikey doesn’t change or learn anything. That’s not a problem in and of itself; a lack of growth can make for its own kind of compelling portrait, perhaps a tragic one, a cautionary tale, or a downward spiral. But, Mr. Baker, if I’m to spend 130 minutes with this lowlife, what should I take away from his story? Interspersed throughout the film is news footage in the background from the 2016 US presidential election. They’re hardly subtle; I mean, there’s no such thing as a subtle reference to Donald Trump, but they’re clearly intended to convey a theme. Perhaps Baker means to portray the American dream as a con job, achieved through relentless self-interest and a wholehearted rejection of community. IndieWire critic David Ehrlich suggested that Mikey is indeed an avatar of Trump, but as with last year’s Trump drama The Apprentice, which similarly frustrated me, it’s not enough simply to describe an asshole. For me the film doesn’t do enough to justify the difficult slog of spending this much time with him.

So I’ve now seen Sean Baker’s four most recent feature films — one for each Oscar — and while I can’t say I outright loved any of them, I appreciate his unsparing look at economic struggle in far-flung American communities — from Los Angeles to Texas to Florida to Brooklyn — that have more in common than they might appear on their surfaces. And I like how he challenges us to sympathize with dysfunctional people. I think he intends for them to be difficult to root for, but we shouldn’t give up on difficult people. They may be fighting battles we know nothing about. Now we know a little something about those battles.

Except Mikey. Fuck that guy.