On demand: "Tangerine"

2015's Tangerine was one of the writer-director Sean Baker's first studies of figures on the fringes of contemporary American life, in this case two transgender sex workers dealing with a spiralling situation. It's Christmas Eve in North Hollywood, and for Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), there's none of the usual pre-festive winding down. Instead, we bear witness to a sudden and dramatic winding-up: Sin-Dee learns her beloved has been cheating on her while she's been serving a 30-day sentence for soliciting, and - adding insult to injury - cheating on her with a cisgender white girl. Off she tears to extract confessions from (and possibly exact revenge on) all parties, her pal in tow whenever Alexandra can keep up, pursued by the ingenious and resourceful Baker, shooting the action on an iPhone (with certain image-correcting lenses) so as to keep costs down and generate greater immediacy. (Some scenes accordingly resemble those shopfront confrontations that occasionally go viral on social media.) What follows proceeds not along the straight lines of the Hollywood mainstream - ain't nothin' straight here, hun - but in a frenetic zigzag under an unseasonal sun, heading late into the night. Along the way, we're even offered something of a narrative puzzle, invited to consider what our heroines' haphazard progress has to do with an Armenian cab driver (Karren Karagulian) - a more conventional portrait of an L.A. working stiff - to whom Baker sporadically cuts.

The thrill of Tangerine is tied up with that iPhone, and how it seems to liberate the action: you feel Baker and his excellently named cinematographer Radium Cheung could go anywhere and shoot anything, could veer off down any one of the side streets they pass and alight upon a comparable brouhaha. (As for the taxi driver business: well, why not? Easier to sit in the backseat for a few blocks than hare after the female leads on foot - and such mobile focus worked for Jafar Panahi in his time, though Panahi never went as far, and was never allowed to go as far, as Baker does here. One quietly funny running gag: how delighted all the working girls are to see the cabbie. You'll see why.) This does seem a production governed by the girls' mantra-like cry of "fuck it": it does what it does for the story, or for shits and giggles, and that spontaneity is a large part of its charm. Tangerine has a freshness beyond bigger American movies, busy tying themselves in knots to no good end. With no budget for effects or chases, Baker is obliged to fall back on that old favourite human interest, and both Rodriguez and Taylor light up the screen, trash-talking whirlwinds who were never going to hit their marks and often seem more inclined to hit one another, thereby laying waste to several city blocks. Baker has proven especially adept at sourcing such personalities and then allowing them to be, flourish, shine, but here he also demonstrates a marked sympathy for those around them, most notably the Chinese woman stuck doing a solo shift at the donut shop where the film's primary troublemakers gather to thrash out their differences. The subsequent The Florida Project would refine the technique and massage in a little more of the emotional subtlety that arrives late here, but Tangerine retains the forceful impact of citrus to the face: it's a movie that grabs you by the weave, whether you like it rough or not.

Tangerine is available to stream via Prime Video and MUBI, and to rent via the BFI Player and YouTube.