Sean Baker is a filmmaker who tends to focus on fringe characters, the kinds of people existing on the outer edges of what’s considered normal or beneficial to society. His previous film, the highly underrated Starlet, looked at an unlikely friendship between a young porn star and an elderly widow. One character was an outcast because of her career, while the other was tossed aside for outliving their usefulness, but Baker made this odd couple pairing work by focusing on the characters first (Baker doesn’t even reveal the pornography aspect of the film until halfway through).

Tangerine is, in many ways, a different beast from Starlet: more brash, intense, saturated, kinetic and uncompromising (just to name a few of the many adjectives that can get thrown this film’s way). But look through the hyperactive, sun-kissed surface and both films have the same, humanist centre.

The friendship here is between Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), two transgender prostitutes barely scraping by in Los Angeles. They’re both sharp-witted, uncompromising people, although Alexandra would be considered the more low-key personality. Sin-Dee is like a tornado of aggression, the kind of person who gets their way by shouting down anything in opposition, and Tangerine takes a similarly no-nonsense approach to its storytelling. It takes less than 2 minutes for the plot to get introduced and set in motion; after getting out of jail on Christmas Eve, Alexandra tells Sin-Dee over a donut that her boyfriend/pimp Chester (James Ransome) has been cheating on her with cis female prostitute Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan), prompting Sin-Dee to walk the streets in search for her cheating boyfriend and the “fish” he’s sleeping with.

Once Sin-Dee stomps out of the donut shop (a location that Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch cleverly return to at the end, a move that gives the film a nice, balanced structure amidst the chaos), the camera whirls around her and the soundtrack starts blasting. It feels like Sin-Dee taking over the film herself, and Baker letting viewers know what to expect: this is the kind of film you have to submit yourself to. Baker makes sure the pacing stays relentless, but he also breaks the narrative off into two other strands beyond Sin-Dee’s crazed campaign of fury.

The first of these follows Alexandra (who bails out on helping Sin-Dee once her promise of “no drama” gets shoved out the window) as she wanders the city, trying to earn some cash and get people to see her perform a musical number at a club later that night. The other story, and by far the calmest of the three, focuses on taxi driver Razmik (Karren Karagulian), a husband and father whose ties to Sin-Dee and Alexandra aren’t revealed immediately.

The three-pronged structure helps Tangerine from becoming too overwhelming, but by letting these characters go off on their own, it also helps define them as individuals. Rodriguez, Taylor and Karagulian are all excellent, taking Baker and Bergoch’s script and inhabiting their roles to the point where it feels like the screenplay was written around their personalities. And the cinematography by Baker and Radium Cheung—if you didn’t know already, Tangerine was shot entirely on iPhones, a fact that thankfully hasn’t been overshadowing the film itself—lets all the craziness unfold with a realism that highlights a character like Sin-Dee’s authenticity rather than indulging in her boisterous behaviour. The cinematography also helps establish subtle stylistic differences between each person: Sin-Dee’s story has the camera practically bouncing off the walls, Alexandra’s sees the camera calming down (Alexandra isn’t afraid to be like Sin-Dee if she has to be), and Razmik’s story finds the camera stuck in the tiny space of his cab for the most part.

But the decision to split things up also has its downsides. It’s quite easy to pick out the weak link, and here it’s Razmik’s storyline that can act as dead weight, even though Baker clearly intends for it to act as more of a counterweight. Razmik’s more conventional life, with a wife, daughter and a family dinner on Christmas Eve, acts as a contrast to Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s existence of living from John to John, but Razmik’s secret desire for transgender prostitutes lets Baker delve into the performative aspects of the characters. Yes, Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s exaggerative personas can make them feel like they’re playing a role, but it’s a role they choose to play, whereas Yazmik’s family man persona is a role he feels like he’s supposed to play. Baker communicates these ideas once the climax ties all three narrative strands together, but by tying it to a story that feels, in comparison to the other two, rather dull and shoehorned in, the themes fail to resonate as much as they should.

I’m disappointed that Tangerine didn’t work for me as much as Starlet did. What I found so refreshing about Baker’s last film was the humanism at its core, and while Tangerine has the same qualities, they feel drowned out from the style. It’s not that Tangerine is a bad film (read this rating as more of a recommendation with some reservations); it’s funny, energetic and cements Baker as a vital force in American independent cinema. But I also found its conclusion—a quiet, shared moment between Sin-Dee and Alexandra emphasizing their strong bond—somewhat unearned. I wish Tangerine had more moments like it throughout, rather than just at the end.

Tangerine is currently playing in select theaters across the US and Canada.

Twice nominated Independent Spirit Award director Sean Baker, in his fourth feature film, shows us the development of an unlikely friendship between two people with nothing in common and nearly 60 years separating them apart. Starlet is a character study centered on a moral dilemma that yields results that you would not expect. Eventually secrets come out from everyone involved.

Jane (Dree Hemingway) recently moved into a house with a friend who seems more interested in playing video games and getting high than anything else. This friend works in the adult entertainment business and has all the baggage that you would expect to come from it. Jane’s only stability comes from her small dog, which the film was named after, as it is the only relationship that Jane has and one of the few things she can call her own.

It is obvious that Jane does not quite feel at home in her new place since there is nothing of hers in it. It is a common reaction for someone to feel like they need to change or add something a living space to make it feel like a part of it is their own. So Jane decides to go around to several yard sales looking for new items to decorate her place with. She picks up several items from different yard sales but she soon finds out that a thermos that she bought will end up being more than she bargained for, literary. Jane discovers a substantial amount of cash that was stuffed into the thermos when she tries to use it for the first time. She then ponders whether or not to keep the unexpected windfall of money or return it back to the elderly lady she bought it from.

Ridden with guilt, Jane decides to meet up with the lady to help her out with random errands in an effort to repay her back without actually giving the money back. Jane pays off the taxi waiting for her at a grocery store to accomplish this to make it seem like it was a random occurrence. She finds out that the older lady’s name is Sadie (Besedka Johnson) and that she has absolutely nothing in common. Sadie is mostly confused as to why Jane wants to help her out so much all of a sudden and is very cold to her at first because of that.

Jane is trying to be as good of a samaritan as she can without giving back the money outright. It takes a while for Sadie to warm up to Jane but she eventually does. The two end up forming a friendship based off nothing and on the fact that Jane received a great deal of Sadie’s money without her knowing. How long she can keep it from Sadie is unknown as is what would happen if she did find out.

Without spoiling too much of the film, a problem I had with the film was the characters themselves. It was hard to have much compassion for Jane as she only seemed to be doing half of a good deed. Which you could argue is a half-step up from the other life choices she has made considering her good friend is a porn star who steals from her. Sadie was the character that you find yourself caring about the most, the rest of the characters tend to be shallow with few likeable characteristics.

The camera work in Starlet was excellent as was the editing so it was easy to tell Sean Baker knew what he was doing on that end. The two things I felt could have used some improvement were the script and the acting. The acting was my least favorite part of the film aside from the 85 year-old Besedka Johnson. People were saying Dree Hemingway had a breakout performance (I would call it brave) but I believe that would actually go to Besedka, who made her first acting appearance here at the tender age of 85.

Starlet felt like a film that had two completely different ideas for plots that could have worked well on their own instead of trying to incorporate both. The result can be summed up with the old saying of, “if you chase two rabbits and you will catch neither”. Instead of focusing on the unorthodox relationship between Jane and Sadie the subplot of behind the scenes in the adult entertainment industry kept interrupting and taking too much focus. It is unfortunate because Starlet could have worked out better than it did.

Starlet is an indie drama that tells a story about an unconventional friendship that begins when 21 year-old Jane discovers a hidden stash of money from an object she purchased from an elderly woman named Sadie. Many who have seen the film are claiming a breakout performance by the lead Dree Hemingway.

Synopsis of Starlet:

Starlet explores the unlikely friendship between 21 year-old aspiring actress Jane (Dree Hemingway) and elderly widow Sadie (Besedka Johnson) after their worlds collide in California’s San Fernando Valley. Jane spends her time getting high with her dysfunctional roommates and taking care of her chihuahua Starlet, while Sadie passes her days alone, tending to her garden. After a confrontation at a yard sale, Jane finds something unexpected in a relic from Sadie’s past. Her curiosity piqued, she tries to befriend the caustic older woman. Secrets emerge as their relationship grows, revealing that nothing is ever as it seems.

Watch the official trailer for Starlet: