Starlomo Review: Akinyoola Ayoola Takes the Screen, and Mostly Holds It

When a content creator announces a cinema debut, the pre-release conversation rarely starts from a neutral position. Kamo State, whose real name is Akinyoola Ayoola, had been in that conversation for months before Starlomo reached cinemas on the 25th of September 2026, with social media skepticism running alongside genuine curiosity about what a performer of his particular brand could do with a full feature.

The skeptics had a point. The skit format that made him a household name is built on a specific compression of energy, and cinema is a different machine entirely. What the skeptics did not account for was that Akinyoola Ayoola, when the camera is rolling and the material calls for it, can do something most people associated with his work would not have predicted: disappear into a character and stay there.

Starlomo follows Ayotide, a young man who abandons his family’s food joint to chase a music career in Lagos, finds himself trapped inside an exploitative motor park taxi ring, and eventually returns home after tragedy to discover something about his family that reframes everything he thought he understood about where he came from. The story is about music and ambition on the surface. Beneath that, it is about the cost of family secrets and the possibility of completing something a previous generation was forced to leave unfinished.

The Arc That Matters

The most common reading of a film like this is the rising star narrative: a young man pursues a dream, faces obstacles, overcomes them, and arrives at success. Starlomo gestures toward that reading and then, in its final stretch, declines to complete it in the expected way. Ayotide does not become the superstar he set out to be in the conventional sense. What he becomes is something the film argues is more significant: a man who understands where his gift came from, and who uses that understanding to complete something his parents could not.

The discovery that his parents were celebrated Fuji musicians whose career was stolen from them is the film’s most emotionally ambitious idea. It asks the audience to believe that this family carried a major secret for years, that the same parents who discouraged Ayotide’s musical ambitions were themselves robbed of theirs, and that what felt like opposition was actually a kind of protection against the mistakes they had already made. It is a compelling idea. The difficulty is that the screenplay introduces it at a point in the film where it feels inserted for emotional leverage rather than grown from the foundation of what came before. There are no early seeds planted that would make the revelation feel inevitable when it arrives. We are told rather than shown, and the emotional weight the film wants the moment to carry exceeds what the preceding structure can support.

There is something true, and very Nigerian, about parents who withhold their histories from their children out of a combination of pain, pride, and protection. That truth is visible in the film. But the narrative did not find a way to hint at that history early enough for the audience to experience the revelation the way Ayotide does: as something that was always there, waiting to be found.

The ending, however, earns its sentiment. Seeing Ayotide’s song trend on social media, his parents’ voices woven into his music, and his future pointing upward rather than arriving is the right choice. The film always was about roots, not destination, and the closing frames honour that argument.

The Motor Park as Character

What Starlomo does most convincingly is place its audience inside the specific texture of Lagos motor park life and keep them there long enough to feel it. The crassness is not incidental. The shouting, the negotiation, the hierarchy of who owns space and who is tolerated within it, all of this is rendered with the kind of familiarity that suggests people on both sides of the camera knew the world they were building. If the film makes you feel the stress of being in those streets, that is the intention working correctly.

The relationship between Ayotide and Dagogo, the motor park boss whose operation absorbs him, is the film’s most dynamically alive thread. Their scenes carry the specific tension of a power imbalance that both parties understand clearly and perform carefully around. The motor park world never tries to be anything other than what it is, which is more than can be said for Hannah’s story.

KieKie (Bukunmi Adeaga-Ilori), plays Hannah with enough charm in her character’s initial register to establish her as someone Ayotide can rely on. When the dynamic shifts, it shifts too quickly and without sufficient grounding. Her hostility toward Ayotide arrives as a displacement of what is happening in her relationship, and while that psychology is legible enough, the manner of the shift, the sharpness and the crassness of the transition, reads as an exaggerated response rather than an earned one. The character’s turn is motivated by economic anxiety and relational pressure, both real things, but the performance of that pressure tips into territory that makes Hannah feel less like a person navigating a crisis and more like a tonal detour the film has not prepared us for.

What Akinyoola Ayoola Proves

Kamo State built his following on a comic archetype: the funny one, the jester, the character you expect to defuse rather than drive a scene. Starlomo puts Ayotide in the middle of the drama rather than alongside it, and Akinyoola Ayoola rises to the repositioning. He is not performing a version of his familiar self here. He is playing a young man with a genuine arc, who is naïve in the first act, worn down by the middle, and transformed by what he discovers toward the end. The transitions between these states are not seismic or showy. They are the quieter kind of change that you notice has happened without being able to pinpoint exactly when it occurred. That is a respectable accomplishment for someone making their first lead in a feature film of this scale.

Lateef Adedimeji as Dagogo is, as is consistently true of his work, exactly what the role requires. His Dagogo has the kind of authority that does not need to announce itself: he simply occupies his scenes with the ease of a man who knows his power is not in question, and the scenes between him and Ayotide become the film’s most reliably engaging passages. Lanre Adediwura, making his cinema debut, demonstrates the precise timing of a performer who knows how to calibrate his character’s function within an ensemble without overshooting it.

The City Through a Different Frame

Cinematically, Starlomo is not interested in making Lagos beautiful. The outdoor daytime scenes are harsh and unpolished, the grading minimal, the colours direct rather than refined. For a film about the grit of the city’s underside, this is a choice rather than a limitation. What the camera does find, in its angles and in the specific geography it chooses to document, is a Lagos that is frequently overlooked by production designs that prefer the island’s cleaner surfaces. The motor parks, the life under bridges, the activity of commercial bus drivers: all of it is captured with specificity that gives the film’s world a texture that no amount of colour correction would have produced.

The use of speed ramps for action moments, most visibly during the confrontational scenes, applies an emphasis that draws attention to itself more than it draws attention to the action. A well-executed punch does not need to be ramped up for the audience to register its impact. Using the technique repeatedly produces a diminishing return, and it sits at odds with the otherwise grounded visual logic the film maintains.

Final Thoughts

Starlomo is a better film than the pre-release anxiety about it suggested. It is also a film that does not fully deliver on its most interesting idea, and that settles for a heritage reveal that should have been the beating heart of the story but arrives feeling like an afterthought. Akinyoola Ayoola earns his place at the centre of a cinema screen, which is not a sentence that would have been easy to say with confidence before this film existed. That is no small thing. And Kayode Kasum, who directed two other releases this same year, gives the motor park world the kind of sustained atmospheric attention it deserves, even if his handling of the film’s more dramatic pivots is less certain.

The broader significance of Starlomo is what it represents for the expansion of who gets to headline Nollywood cinema. Every time a film proves that a content creator’s audience will follow them into a theatre, and that the performer can hold that audience with a character rather than a persona, it widens the space for others to attempt the same crossing. Not every attempt will succeed. This one does more than not fail.

Verdict

Watch Starlomo for Akinyoola Ayoola’s performance and for the specific atmosphere of the motor park sequences, which capture a Lagos that most cinema productions deliberately avoid. It is a worthwhile cinema outing, particularly for audiences with a genuine appetite for seeing what Nollywood can do when it steps outside its comfort zones.

Rating: 2.5/5