Review | “Kokomo City”: D. Smith’s documentary offers an audacious, endearing, illuminating, often amusingly ribald primer on the lives of Black trans sex workers.
“Kokomo City,” D. Smith’s impressive debut documentary about Black trans sex workers, arrives in time to be an audacious, endearing, illuminating, often amusingly ribald primer. At once a vivid group portrait and lucid social commentary, this fleet, visually lively slice of life offers a sometimes startlingly candid glimpse of realities that are too often obscured, demonized and relegated to the margins.
The real tea is exactly what “Kokomo City’s” feisty, self-possessed protagonists are ready to serve. The narrative centers mostly on four subjects: Liyah Mitchell and Koko Da Doll, both in Atlanta, and Dominique Silver and Daniella Carter, in New York. The film opens with Liyah recounting a particularly harrowing encounter, when she discovered that her customer was carrying a gun. What ensues is both terrifying and shocking, not least because of the way it ended .
Keeping the camera trained on Liyah’s expressive face, intercutting with pantomimed reenactments and stylized images of guns twirling in the air, Smith brings a lilting sense of joviality to a story that, like almost every anecdote in the film, possesses a darker undercurrent of real, ever-present danger.
Inevitably, common themes emerge, as “Kokomo City” becomes a meditation on masculinity, femininity, what constitutes pleasure, and the bitter price of personal and social denial. The film’s most intriguing and insistent voice belongs to Daniella, whose monologues about race, class, gender and female solidarity are both bracingly honest and brilliantly astute.
”: Both movies, after all, get to a reality of women’s lives that Gloria Steinem identified years ago. At the end of the day, one way or another, we’re all female impersonators.At area theaters. Contains strong sexual references and images, graphic nudity, crude language throughout, and drug use. 73 minutes.
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