“Red Rocket” is writer-director Sean Baker’s follow-up to 2017’s “The Florida Project” (reviewed 10/1/2018). Like the earlier film, it is a funny, canny examination of a select group of Americans losers, but with a more complex, and stronger, story line. Obviously, Baker is more confident now.

The protagonist is Mikey (Simon Rex), a tall, well-toned dropout of forty with a huge appetite for sex. After a violent meltdown of his Hollywood porn business, he decides to make a “fresh start” by arriving at his wife’s house in Texas City, unannounced, after twenty years. But Lexi (Bree Elrod), as well as her mother, are not delighted. Lexi had been Mikey’s first female porn partner in Hollywood but drugs ruined her, and she returned to Texas, leaving Mikey to use, and misuse, a succession of other women to have sex with him on camera. At least until the business collapses. His reappearance makes Lexi confront her re-awakened lust for him, as well as her rage, and she tears into him savagely. But Mikey hasn’t lost it: his charm and glib promises pave the way back into the home, as well as Lexi’s bed.

We soon learn that Mikey is a well-known porno actor, but with little to show for it, not even a car; a bicycle being his only possession. But somewhere there is a plan forming inside him, which commingles with his resentment at how the porn industry exploited his sexual gifts along with a vague itch to become a “player” in the business.

And the plan takes on real form after a visit to a donut shop where her meets Raylee (Suzanna Son), the jailbait charmer who serves him donuts. Strawberry-haired – the “red rocket” of the title – she is hot and irresistibly saucy. Mikey plants a dream-bud inside her that she can become a porno queen in Hollywood if she runs away with him. Mikey’s awakening from this delusion completes the story arc of the film.

Mikey digs into his past and resumes his small-scale pot dealing, with surprising success. But, increasingly, his obsession with Raylee consumes him, which blocks him from seeing his own weaknesses, leading to him getting beaten up by Raylee’s boyfriend and his parents.

There are laughs along the way, sometimes big ones, such as when he explains  – to an increasingly disgusted sexually ambivalent drug dealer – why the “Best Oral” award goes to the one getting sucked instead of to the one doing it.

Still, the bitter-sweet ending fails to satisfy, and is anti-climactic.  We knew from the start that Mikey would lose out to those who were not as smart as him because he was never as smart as he thought he was.