130 min | R | December 10, 2021 | A24
A washed-up porn star washes back into his Texas Gulf Coast hometown with no money and no shame. He starts dealing weed and grooming a teenage girl who works the donut counter. Mikey calls it love. It is a hustle wearing a smile.
Mikey Saber returns to Texas City broke, banned from the adult film industry, and out of options. He moves back in with his estranged wife Lexi and her mother and starts selling marijuana to fund his comeback. The film tracks a charming parasite who attaches himself to everyone within reach and drains them dry. Sean Baker builds the whole picture around a man who never stops performing and never once tells the truth. The real subject is American hustle culture and the people it leaves wrecked in its wake.
Simon Rex plays Mikey as a motormouth con artist who treats every conversation as a sales pitch. He is magnetic and exhausting in equal measure, and Rex never softens the rot underneath the charm. Suzanna Son plays Strawberry, the teenager behind the donut shop counter, with a wide-open innocence that makes Mikey’s predation sicker by the scene. Bree Elrod plays Lexi with hard-won exhaustion and a thousand-yard stare that says she has heard every one of Mikey’s promises before. Brenda Deiss plays Lexi’s mother Lil as a tired enabler who lets the chaos in because she needs the rent.
Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch shoot the film in sun-blasted 16mm that turns the refinery skyline into a constant backdrop of smokestacks and chemical haze. The grain and the heat make Texas City feel like a place the rest of the country forgot. Baker cuts to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” at key moments and lets the bubblegum pop curdle into menace. The handheld camera stays loose and close, and Baker fills the frame with nonprofessional actors whose faces carry real weather. The production never glamorizes the poverty and never condescends to it either.
This is a film about a man who mistakes appetite for ambition and leaves a trail of damage behind every smile. Mikey believes his own pitch, and that self-delusion is the engine of the whole story. Baker refuses to redeem him and refuses to fully condemn him, which is harder and more honest. The film holds you inside Mikey’s orbit long enough to feel the pull of the charm and the dread of where it leads. It is a portrait of a predator who thinks he is the hero of his own comeback.