Simon Rex on What Happens When the Party’s Over

It’s the middle of the night, and a man is running down a deserted street, to the tune of ’NSync’s 2000 hit “Bye Bye Bye.” The song’s bombastic, driving beat gives its melancholy breakup lyrics some urgency: “I know that I can’t take no more / It ain’t no lie / I wanna see you out that door / Baby, bye bye bye.” This particular man, however, has clearly been tossed out of someone’s door, rather than the other way around. He is fleeing, totally nude, his eyes wide with panic. And, although one can’t help but notice that he has an unusually large penis, this conventional signifier of virility can only dingle-dangle helplessly, bobbing rhythmically as he tears down the road.

The man is Mikey Saber, a washed-up, middle-aged porn star, and the protagonist of Sean Baker’s excellent new film, “Red Rocket.” Mikey’s naked dash comes late in the movie, but from the get-go we can sense that his character is something of an escape artist. When we first meet him, he is on a cross-country bus, with nothing more than twenty-two dollars in the pocket of his stonewashed skinny jeans. He has been run out of Los Angeles, where he was working in the adult-entertainment industry, and is making his way back to his home town, Texas City, Texas, on the Gulf Coast.

A fast-talking scammer whose corny niceties are as well-worn as his good looks, Mikey is still convincing as a hunk, if only you don’t look too closely. (After watching the movie a couple of times, it suddenly came to me that the figure he most reminded me of was the No. 1 motormouthed hustler of reality television, Jax Taylor, from Bravo’s “Vanderpump Rules.”) He obsessively dwells on his past achievements: he has won five Adult Video News Awards—“Best oral three years in a row,” he says—and seems convinced that his once successful porn career is evidence of a still bright future ahead. “Almost every single girl I did a scene with started fucking me off camera,” he boasts. Later, he says, “With my skill and ability . . . there’s no denying what I can do!”

“Red Rocket” has a trace of “Rip Van Winkle” to it. Mikey’s return, he hopes, will give him a chance to act as if the indignities of the past decade and a half hadn’t happened at all. But the indignities have only just begun: his estranged wife, Lexi (the great Bree Elrod), and her mother, Lil (Brenda Deiss), are not exactly happy to see him when he appears on the doorstep of their tumbledown house, begging to be let in. (“I just need a place to crash for a couple of days!”) Searching for work, he cycles around town on a girl’s bike, like Homer when he loses his driver’s license on “The Simpsons” and has to ride Lisa’s undersized pink two-wheeler to the power plant. “Your last job listed is from over seventeen years ago,” a potential employer notes, when Mikey applies for a menial job, and is less than impressed when Mikey explains that he is, in fact, an adult-film actor. He ends up becoming a weed dealer.

The film is set in the lead-up to the 2016 Presidential election, and Texas City is depicted as a run-down, economically depressed place that is kept going, if barely, by the churning refineries of Big Oil, whose workers Mikey sells marijuana to. (They are dependable customers, he is told, since “at the end of their shift . . . they want to kill themselves,” and need something to take the edge off.) In the course of the movie, we hear sound bites from the two candidates, whose speeches drone, like background noise, on the television in Lexi and Lil’s grubby living room. In this context, Hillary Clinton’s professed “boundless confidence in America’s promise” sounds as disconnected from reality as Trump’s paranoid ravings about the election being rigged.

Mikey, too, seems keen on ignoring his downbeat surroundings and remains almost manically upbeat, regardless of his lived reality. “Mikey has these delusions of grandeur,” Simon Rex, the actor who plays the character, told me. “He thinks he’s really going to make it, that the dream is just around the corner. It’s the American dream, but you realize it’s actually the American nightmare.” When I met Rex at a beer garden on the Lower East Side, a few weeks ago, he was charming and jokey, speaking animatedly as he nursed a Pilsner. Though not as manic as Mikey, he was certainly high-energy: “People think I’m a cokehead, but I actually hate cocaine,” he said. “I’m naturally on cocaine. If anything, I need something to slow the fuck down.”

The actor, who is forty-seven, was born in San Francisco, where he was raised by his mother after his parents split. Once he finished high school, he worked a series of low-level jobs: “I operated a forklift at a potato-sack factory, where I was punching a physical clock, like it was the fifties,” he said. “I also did telemarketing, where I’d cold-call people to sell life insurance for State Farm. The worst!” Then, at a rave, he met a girl who was an aspiring model. He followed her to Los Angeles and through her, without really planning it, entered the entertainment industry. He began modelling, walking runways in cities from Milan to Paris to New York. Later, he landed a gig as an MTV v.j., which he parlayed into a mid-tier acting career, on television shows such as “Felicity” (he played the N.Y.U. art-school heartthrob who relieves Keri Russell’s titular character of her virginity) and in the popular “Scary Movie” spoof franchise, along with some even less memorable fare. “I did a kids’ movie called ‘Karate Dog,’ with Jon Voight and my then girlfriend, Jaime Pressly,” he told me. “It was really bad.”

Rex was a successful enough hottie of the Bush years, a white-grinned, hard-torsoed white boy who could make a suburban thirteen-year-old swoon. (“I thought he was SO hot,” a thirtysomething friend of mine, who was in middle school during Rex’s heyday, texted me after she heard that I was meeting with him. “Very formative for me.”) He was also a minor tabloid staple, out partying at Hollywood clubs, where he’d get photographed making out with the likes of Paris Hilton. (“We were just homies,” he told me. “She’s a really funny, down, cool girl.”) By 2004, he had made enough money to buy himself a home in Laurel Canyon, but his career ambitions were limited. “At that point, I was chasing pleasure,” he said. “I wasn’t serious about work. Everything got handed to me.” At around this time, too, two masturbation videos that he had shot with a gay-porn director at nineteen, when he was in need of cash, reëmerged, deepening his louche image.

The actor Adrien Brody, who is a friend of his, suggested that, while Rex was waiting to book roles, he should learn how to make rudimentary hip-hop beats on a hobbyist’s keyboard. Rex took the advice, and, teaming up with the L.A. musicians Mickey Avalon and Andre Legacy, he achieved cult success with joke raps that he made under the name Dirt Nasty. These were crudely infectious drugs-and-sex anthems made for a Friday-night good time, but they also thrummed with an unsettling energy. (In “Hydrocodone,” for instance, a goofy offering about getting fucked up with your buddies turns opioid-crisis dark, as Rex raps, “(Doctor, doctor) / I’m feeling sick / (Doctor, doctor) / I need a fix / (Doctor, doctor) / Give me my scrip / (Doctor, doctor) / We know where you live.”) Despite his party-boy reputation, Rex told me that he always kept himself slightly apart from the most destructive aspects of the Hollywood life style. “I had a front-row seat for a lot of that,” he said, “and I saw what fame and drugs and money did to people.” In 2011, he joined his friend Charlie Sheen, after Sheen’s public meltdown, on his train-wreck one-man live tour. “I’d come out at the end and do a song. It was a disaster!” This was as good an indication as any that no party could last forever.