The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Preview)
Reviewed by Mary F. Corey

Produced by Khaliah Neal, Joe Talbot, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, and Chrisina Oh; directed by Joe Talbot; executive producers Brad Pitt, Sarah Esberg, and Kimberly Parker; written by Joe Talbot and Rob Richert; story by Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails; director of photography Adam Newport-Berra; edited by David Marks; music by Emile Mosseri; starring Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Rob Morgan, Tichina Arnold, Mike Epps, Finn Wittrock, Danny Glover, and Willie Hen. Blu-ray, color, 121 min. An A24 release.

In the opening sequence of the The Last Black Man in San Francisco a tiny African American girl gazes upward in wonder. The obscure object of her fascination is a gigantic boxy head set atop a misshapen, vaguely humanoid body—something like a Minecraft monster. Wait, is this a horror movie? 

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is definitely not a horror movie. It is a film that defies categorization—one we haven’t seen before. While it is in some ways an affectionate reimagining of the buddy movie and also flirts with the deep-family-secret genre, this smart, eccentric film, set in a rapidly transforming San Francisco, is pretty much its own dog. It is part auto-fiction, part love song to a city, part experimental theater piece, part portrait of the artist as a young man, and most definitely an art film. If surrealism and homesickness had a love child, it would look something like this. 

The Minecraft monster of the opening sequence turns out to be a man in a Hazmat suit testing the waters of the toxic San Francisco Bay. Within earshot of Hazmat man, a black preacher in a dark suit stands on a milk crate in the middle of the street shouting about the filthy bay and the destruction of the planet. “This is your home!” he shouts. “This is your home! Do something!” This jeremiad has an audience of two. The film’s protagonists, Montgomery and Jimmie, best friends who share, among other things, the deadpan gravitas of a pair of black Buster Keatons, watch the preacher from the opposite curb as they wait for a bus that never comes. 

The film, directed and co-written by first-time feature director Joe Talbot, was inspired by the life of his long-time friend Jimmie Fails, who co-wrote the story and plays its principal protagonist, “Jimmie Fails.” At the center of Jimmie’s life is an obsession with reclaiming the Victorian-style house that was built by his grandfather in the Fillmore District, once known as the Harlem of the West. Jimmie’s late grandfather, a man given to extravagant declarations, maintained that he was the first black man in San Francisco. This claim, it turns out, is not the only example of Grandfather Fails’s tendency toward truthiness. 

Jimmie’s yearning for the home he lived in as a child is made all the more urgent because when we first encounter him he is essentially homeless, sleeping on a narrow strip of floor alongside Montgomery’s bed in the house his friend shares with his blind grandfather (Danny Glover) on the outskirts of town. Over the years, the Fails family has fallen from grace. They long ago let the lovely old house with its scalloped shingles, its witchs’ hat, and its elaborately decorated balustrades slip away. Jimmie’s father, James Sr. (the excellent Rob Morgan), hides his failures behind a punishing bravado and lives meagerly in subsidized housing downtown. Jimmie’s aunt has fled to a distant suburb. And Jimmie thinks his mother, who abandoned him and the city years before, may still be somewhere in California. 

The woes of the Fails family mirror the larger history of San Francisco’s once buoyant black population, which has been marginalized and/or decimated by the forces of gentrification, suburbanization, a shrinking job market, and the war on drugs. But this is not a tendentious film about the historical forces at work in San Francisco. We learn of the family’s precipitous decline through a series of subtle cinematic cues: the tricked out vintage Chevy that Jimmy and his father once lived in has been appropriated by Bobby (Mike Epps), a slick scammer who tells Jimmie, “you really can’t own anything,” and who, we discover, also makes his home in the car. James Sr., a sometime musician, who lost the family house in a haze of drugs and fantasist schemes, spends his days in the half-darkness of his one-room apartment fabricating slip-on covers for his comeback CD. In a particularly raw scene, Jimmie runs into his mother (played by his actual mother, LaShay Starks) on the BART. She is on her cell, telling someone she has four years of sobriety and that she’ll see them at the meeting. Jimmie has not seen her in so long that he doesn’t immediately recognize her. “Jimbo?” she says, tentatively. They stand awkwardly and hug, avoiding one another’s eyes. She makes a promise to come and see him—a promise that he knows and we know will not be kept. 

The home that is the object of Jimmie’s desire is now owned by a pair of hapless white boomers who have allowed the place to fall into disrepair. Jimmie likes to visit when he knows the owners will be out, leaving his mark on the house by making small repairs. He repaints the external filigree, decides to restore the wrought iron railings to their original periwinkle, and has plans to revamp the overgrown garden. The gray-haired boomers have come home more than once to find a black twenty-something stranger daubing paint on their finials. The wife sputters angrily, “What’s your deal, man?” as she hurls tomatoes from her grocery bag at Jimmie’s head and threatens to call the cops. Her husband, a nice enough fellow, assures Jimmie that the cops won’t be called and tries to settle his wife down. For his part, Jimmie quietly continues painting, explaining that he’s “almost done,” that “it’ll just be another minute.” 

For the most part, the white characters in the film are cartoonish dweebs who throw around words and phrases like “man,” “awesome,” “that sucks,” and “right on, bro,” as if this was how one is meant to speak to black people. While we are clearly meant to be seeing these folks through the black gaze, it still feels like a small failing in the film (like a movie in English directed by an accomplished European director)…

To read the complete review, click here so that you may order either a subscription to begin with our Winter 2019 issue, or order a copy of this issue.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste, Inc. 

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1