‘Kokomo City’: Four Black trans sex workers tell it like it is

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 (reader, she didn’t marry him, but …).

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. “Kokomo City” bursts not just with the indomitable energy of the smart, mesmerizingly beautiful women Smith has cast, but with the contradictions of their lives, which have been witness to cruelty, exploitation and violence, but also growth, self-discovery, and unimaginable physical and emotional courage.

Smith, a Grammy-nominated former music producer, singer and songwriter, brings those chops to bear on a narrative that never flags. (She also brings her own lived experience: She has said in interviews that her music career was derailed once she came out as a trans.) Filmed in silky black and white, “Kokomo City” favors images of its heroines primping, posing and lounging languidly while they relate their home truths, but Smith keeps the beauty shots moving with quick asides, animations, neon-yellow screen titles and some very clever sound edits. Men have a voice in “Kokomo City” — we meet Michael Carlos Jones, an Atlanta songwriter known as “Lo,” who is grappling with his attraction to a trans woman he met online — but the film is at its most galvanizing simply when it allows these women to tell their stories unvarnished, except for the nail polish.

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. In fact, seen through a feminist lens, “Kokomo City” might be the perfect flip side to “Barbie”: 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.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong sexual references and images, graphic nudity, crude language throughout, and drug use. 73 minutes.