The Last Black Man in San Francisco
You don’t get to hate it unless you love it
Directed by Joe Talbot
United States, 2019
This film opens with a little girl skipping around a man wearing a Hazmat suit while a soapbox preacher shouts, “Remember your truth in a city of facades”. It makes you wonder if we are in a post-apocalyptic world, which is kind of true when you realise that we are in San Francisco where the old city is dying, if not already dead.
Sometimes a film can take on so many themes that it starts to feel unwieldy, perhaps overblown. Well, that is one take on Joe Talbot’s magisterial debut, The Last Black Man in San Francisco. ReidsonFilm were divided in their view of what story this film was trying to tell, as well as how that story was told but we all agreed that Talbot along with co-writer and star, Jimmie Fails (who plays the character ‘Jimmie Fails’), have created an engaging and beautiful work.
In common with last week’s film, After Hours, we have another picture where the city takes centre stage. On this occasion we cross to the East Coast, San Francisco. Our introduction to the city is a bravura super-slow-motion tracking shot that follows the two leads, Jimmie Fails and Montgomery (Jonathan Majors), across town on Jimmie’s skateboard. This scene suspends time and bathes the city in a romantic glow.
Jimmie Fails (the writer) based The Last Black Man in San Francisco on his own history. As a boy he lived in a grand old Victorian house owned by his grandfather. Gentrification came, the house was sold, his family split, and Jimmie ended up in a group home for adolescents. In the film Jimmie lives with his best friend Mont and they regularly visit the house to repaint it and tend the garden. The current owners have been living in the house for 12 years and threaten to call the police to end this ‘harrassment’, but they never do.
That is the basis of the plot but the film reaches for more: touching on racism, marginalized communities, suburbanization, the internment of the Japanese residents during WWII, and the war on drugs. Key though is a sense of displacement, which lends the film a pervasive atmosphere of melancholy. Later, after the owners leave the house Jimmie and Mont move in. His obsession with reclaiming it is central to the film but the outcome is predictable.
San Francisco has more billionaires per capita than any other city …
This synopsis makes The Last Black Man in San Francisco sound like a politically conscious melodrama but it’s really not. Talbot frames the film as a fable, that at times feels surreal and contrived in its staging. There is no little amount of whimsy. And that is where ReidsonFilm had to disagree, although agreeably. Does this blending of forms jar?
Mont is ever-present as the observer, documenting what happens in his red notebook. We later see him dramatise these events in a striking play within the film – a steal from Hamlet. The leads play their parts well although Jimmie remains something of an enigma and Jonathan Majors does veer toward Holy Fool territory. In one scene the local street-corner boys start arguing and as the temperature rises Mont walks up and starts ‘directing’ their actions as if he is making the film and this defuses the tension.
The outstanding performances come from Jimmie’s Aunt (Tichina Arnold) and his estranged addict father (Rob Morgan) who add real weight to the narrative and anchor the film. Then Jimmie finds himself sitting opposite his mother (actually played by his mother, LaShay Starks) on the train. He hasn’t seen her for so long that he doesn’t recognise her at first; she is on her phone, telling a friend that she is sober and will see them at the meeting. They hug awkwardly and she agrees to visit him at the house. He knows – we know – that this won’t happen.
And so there may be flaws but it is difficult to criticize a film that is so seductive in its elegiac depiction of a city. Adam Newport-Berra’s lush cinematography is accompanied by a swooning, lavish score by Emille Mosseri.
The Last Black Man is a love letter to San Francisco but it is bittersweet. The film closes with Jimmie leaving the city but not on his skateboard. He breaks the board, recognizing that his San Francisco, if it was ever really his, has gone. Not all fairytales have a happy ending.
It makes me miss the old days of San Francisco back when I was a kid … and then I realise I’ve literally only been there once - C
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C - 74
T - 79
N - ..
S - 76
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