Simon Rex? Sorry mate, that sounds like a porn star’s name. Not that this can’t be put to good use,.

Rex, who first gained notice on TV’s “Felicity” back in the last millennium, plays an aging not-exactly-a-household name porn actor named Mikey Sabers, clever enough to hustle up a career out of “the one thing I love,” not clever enough to know how to spell “Sabre” as his “swordsman” stage name.

Mikey is a “user,” first scene to last, a guy who can talk himself into and out of a lot of things, but somebody who quickly outstays his welcome with almost everyone –rather like the movie Sean Baker (“The Florida Project”) wrote about Mikey.

“Red Rocket” is a sordid dive into down-market down-and-outers in the hellscape of Texas City, Texas — home to oil refineries, oil workers and people slow in figuring out it’s where dreams go to die. It makes its points, takes the intensely-unlikable guy where he was always headed, and then sticks around a full half hour after the climax, another 15 minutes past the anti-climax.

No porn director would ever make that mistake.

Rex plays the fit but well-over-40 Mikey as a childish satyr, a man always on the make and often on the run. That’s how we meet him, battered and bruised and fresh off a Greyhound, fast-walking through the time capsule of Texas City with just the battered tank top on his back, his worn and stained jeans covering the rest.

He beats on the door of a battered frame house, gets past the elderly Miss Lil (Brenda Deiss) and pleads his case to Lexi (Bree Elrod of “Sometimes I Think About Dying”). She has the same question her mother does.

“Why are you HERE?”

Mikey wants something. He and Lexi have history. They were married. “We’re STILL married.” Something happened. He was in Los Angeles. She came home to live with Mama.

Over the course of “Red Rocket,” we pick up on what happened. Pornography was involved. That’s not the sort of thing Mikey can put on a resume when he’s trying for work waiting tables.

Because at some point, his “You need a man around the house” pleas won them over. Can he get a job, pay a share of the rent, make their lives better? Perhaps atone for whatever he did in the past?

Maybe. If, for instance, Leondria (Judy Hill) lets him start “moving” weed for her again. That means getting past her butch and seriously disapproving daughter June (Brittney Rodriguez).

A little help from the neighbor kid (Ethan Darbone) who grew up to driving age while Mikey was gone might help. Mikey needs rides to places Lexi’s old yellow bike won’t take him — the mall, strip clubs.

But dang it all, then he has to go and take Lil and Lexi to “celebrate” at the local donut shop. The borderline underage sales clerk, a redhead nicknamed “Strawberry” (singer and actress Suzanna Son), seems awfully receptive to Mikey’s over-age come-ons. Scheming, “I’m going to be straight with you” Mikey is dreaming up a comeback, and not one wholly dependent on the little blue pills he pops to meet Lexi’s needs, either.

It’s 2016, and Mikey’s efforts to get back on his feet, get back “in the business” and back to LA are set against the bizarre presidential election, party conventions, the works, unfolding on TV around him.

Can he keep all the balls he’s juggling in the air? Is it in the cards for Mikey to triumph? Or did he show up with just the tank-top on his back, battered and bruised, for a reason?

Rex’s bubbly, almost manic take on Mikey make the character come off as an oversexed, amoral version of “Extreme Makeover’s” Ty Pennington — chattering away, optimistic, flattering but making a sale and never letting us or anybody listening to his patter see him as anything but a toxic narcissist.

Perhaps that’s what writer-director Sean Baker (“Tangerine,” “The Florida Project”) was going for in his Texas City project. Follow this delusional, self-absorbed bottom-of-the-ladder bottom-feeder through a few weeks of the life that parked him as his ex’s front door with just the clothes on his back. Is he meant to be a repeat offender and serial failure like the unlikely con artist who got into the White House?

But Baker loses himself and his movie in this latest dalliance in down and out. We see plenty of visuals of another of America’s “s—hole towns,” follow another aspirational, deluded loser (“Tangerine”), this time one who had a taste of something resembling “fame” (“2000” screen appearances, boasts the no-longer-popular Pornhub participant).

Rex’s Mikey can be fascinating to watch as he uses everybody around him, with varying degrees of success. He talks cocky, confident and tough but lets us see he’s none of those. He has a youthful exuberance without the youth, a “plan” that is nothing of the sort but a charisma that makes people do what he wants.

We fear for the teenager who falls into his thrall, at least partly because we don’t buy it. We see Baker leaning pretty heavily on this picture’s gimmick, Rex’s full frontal nudity, a little too hard. And we wonder why Baker is having so much trouble figuring out how to wrap all this up.

It’s still safe to say that nobody makes indie films like Baker, and few filmmakers of any stripe are seeing the subcultures that he not only sees but wants to explore. But as “Red Rocket” fizzles and stumbles towards a finale that’s both melodramatic in the extreme and unavoidably inevitable, there’s no getting around that this coarse and callous comedy is quite the comedown from the acclaimed and Oscar-feted “Florida Project.” “Red Rocket” makes noise and shows moments of (sexual) flash, but never achieves lift-off.

Rating: R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and pervasive language.

Cast: Simon Rex, Bree Elrod, Suzanna Son, Brenda Deiss, Judy Hill, Brittney Rodriguez and Ethan Darbone.

Credits: Directed by Sean Baker, scripted by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:08