Critic Reviews

Smith’s music and photography instincts carry the film cinematically, but the real stars of Kokomo City are its honest and dynamic subjects.

Kokomo City is a vibrant, original work, shot in black and white, in a kaleidoscopic blend of monologues, conversations, and re-enactments. At a moment when the American right are obsessed with criminalizing health care for transgender people and erasing Black history, it’s also timely.

Punchy delivery styles, shimmering personalities and kaleidoscopic perspectives make up the soul of D. Smith’s gutsy documentary Kokomo City

A constantly surprising, undeniably entertaining portrait that proves anything but monochromatic.

Imaginatively edited, sexually explicit, and filled with eloquent and often boisterous individuals of a sort who rarely get to claim a spotlight in documentaries, the trans sex worker portrait Kokomo City is a blast of creative freedom in an increasingly corporatized period of nonfiction filmmaking.

Hilarious, scary, tragic and sometimes flat-out jaw-dropping, Kokomo City is a gripping and accessible dissection of modern life, told through a brutally specific point of view.

The questions may not be pre-approved by GLAAD, but they’re coming from a trans woman actively working against the usual feel-good talking points; the responses she gets are frank, funny and frequently shocking.

Truly, this covers the whole spectrum of experience, all of it eloquently explained by the subjects, an assortment of women who tell their truths about clients who can’t be honest with themselves, their complicated relationships with friends, family and cis women, the legacy of slave culture, and their favourite portable electric shavers.

For a film that is primarily focused on one person at a time, speaking directly to camera, it is never remotely dull. The lean 73-minute runtime gives Smith all the time she needs to conjure a poignant and personal ode to these four women, and the experiences of Black trans women more broadly. We rarely get to see that on screen this powerfully and unapologetically.

One can offer no greater compliment to D Smith’s examination of the black transgender experience than that it makes the viewer, however they identify, feel a welcomed part of the busy conversation.