On demand: "Kokomo City"

The crossover success of Sean Baker's Tangerine and Sebastián Lelio's A Fantastic Woman - the first a spry, on-the-fly comedy centred on trans sex workers, the latter an Oscar winner in 2018 - appears to have liberated the cinema, or at least the American independent cinema. Kokomo City, debutant director D. Smith's feature-length documentary study of four trans sex workers and the men who adore and pay for them, opens with an anecdote that sets something of a conversational bar. Liyah Mitchell's account of an unpredictable encounter she had with one client first hooks us with the promise of sex, then throws violence into the mix (her john was carrying a concealed weapon, and not the good kind), and powers on towards the working girl equivalent of an M. Night Shyamalan twist ending. (Despite the evening's turbulence - not unlike the neighbourhood-waking palavers Baker filmed in Tangerine - the pair still ended up fucking, because a girl's got to get paid.) Within mere minutes, Smith has established both her film's gossipy tenor (everything's up for discussion here, nothing deemed taboo) and also the risks involved in pursuing this way of life. It's not just that Liyah and her fellow interviewees - Dominique Silver, Daniella Carter and Koko Da Doll, the streetname of one Rasheeda Williams - are trans sex workers; they're Black trans sex workers, and moreover Black trans sex workers plying their trade in an America subject to infamously lax gun laws. Furthermore, their livelihood is dependent upon men who may well be uncomfortable about what any transaction says about them, some of whom are indeed likely to be armed. "This is survival work... this is risky shit," we're told, a state of affairs only underlined by a despairing post-credits reveal. Yet that danger is one of several facets in play within Smith's film - something that just bubbles up in the course of some wildly lively conversation.

For as with many of the Nineties indies Smith's film harks back to - not least in its monochrome, traditionally an indicator of filmmakers who hadn't the resources for colour - here is another disarming example of film as hangout: hits on the jukebox, the kind of choice language that abounds in chilled company (notably several of the most explosive C-bombs in recent screen history), regular laughs, and frequent segues between the trivial and matters of high, life-or-death significance. Kokomo City is, above all else, radically relaxed - I say radical, because in easing up so, in allowing its subjects to inhabit these frames as they choose, it distinguishes and disentangles itself from the uptight and often limiting discourse on gender widely available elsewhere in the media. As the talk circles around and sometimes back on itself, some may find themselves longing for a little more in the way of conventional documentary structure; even in the sit-down interviews, you catch Smith's camera roving restlessly over these bodies. Yet the approach allows the filmmaker to cover an extraordinary amount of thematic ground - these women's lives, their clients' peccadilloes and the fluctuations of male desire, trans women's relationship to cisgender women, the processes of transitioning, the politics of passability - without ever seeming to strain. It's a triumph of documentary casting, first and foremost. Like trans equivalents of the Sex and the City girls, these four women occupy and represent discernibly different positions, both inside the boudoir and beyond it. Some have become more materialistic, audibly hardened by their experiences in and around the marketplace; yet each has their own relationship to work, men, their family and their own Blackness and transness. Cutting between her subjects permits Smith to mirror the recognisably zingy, free-ranging back-and-forths of offscreen conversation; the movie gets intensely into it for a stretch, and then allows us to wind down and cool off. Nobody's getting dangerously overheated, but you may just find yourself being enlightened, surprised, perhaps even moved. In Smith, who is trans herself, these women found not just a director and an advocate, but a friend and confidante: she sees them, hears them all out, and frames them as not merely desirable but cherishable and irreplaceable. "I've been wanting to tell my story for a long time," Koko confesses late on. For the 73 touchingly tentative yet often profound and dazzling minutes of Kokomo City, that time is now.

Kokomo City is now streaming via Channel 4, and available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, the BFI Player, YouTube and Dogwoof on Demand.