Review: The Last Black Man In San Francisco

Image courtesy of A24.

To be able to hate a city, you have to love it first. That's the sentiment of the appropriately named Jimmie Fails (played by, appropriately, an actor named Jimmie Fails), one of the two lead characters in Joe Talbot's lovely and melancholic debut, "The Last Black Man in San Francisco."

While I can't agree 100 percent with Jimmie - there have been some cities I haven't liked, and it wasn't because I loved them first - I can understand where he's coming from. If you've lived somewhere for a long time, you may grow to be frustrated with its faults, but often that feeling of resentment stems from a love for a place and one's wanting it to be better.

The film is both a love letter to the titular city and a poignant tale of a friendship. Jimmie's best pal is Montgomery (Jonathan Majors), a sensitive man who writes plays that are seemingly never produced and makes impressive drawings on a note pad. Montgomery lives with his blind grandfather (Danny Glover), and Jimmie - who we learn is somewhat estranged from his scheming father and absent mother and once lived in a group home - crashes on Montgomery's floor.

Much of Jimmie's time and headspace is devoted to sprucing up a gorgeous house in a gentrified section of San Francisco. Amusingly, the house belongs to an older white couple, who appear alarmed every time he comes around to paint the house or make other fixes, considering that he doesn't live there. The wife even throws fruit at him to try to make him go away, but he's undeterred.

According to Jimmie, his grandfather built the house in the 1940s, but his family eventually lost it. After the neighborhood gentrified, the property was worth $4 million, which Jimmie cannot afford. So, he cares for the place, dreaming that he can one day own it himself. One day, he gets a break after the couple living in the house moves out, leaving it vacant. He and Montgomery move in as squatters.

One of the film's finest elements is how it observes the people of San Francisco. The picture's opening shot is a doozy - Jimmie and Montgomery share a skateboard, riding down the city's hilly streets to the house. On their way, they glide through neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic status, all the while a corner preacher whom they often watch while waiting for the bus gives a sermon about the black community's place in a city that is slowly pushing lower class people out.

The entire film has an observant nature. There's an amusing scene in which Jimmie waits for a bus. A completely naked older man sits down at the bus stop and makes conversation. In another film, the scene would be played for maximum laughs, but Jimmie shrugs it off as just another day in San Francisco.

There's also an ongoing fascination with a group of young black men who stand on the corner near Montgomery's grandfather's house and, essentially, talk shit. Their constant chatter - which involves dissing one another, making fun of passersby or just making aimless conversation - is used humorously - however, we later learn that Jimmie was once friends with one of them, and a tragedy late in the film leads to a poignant scene in which Jimmie notes that you can't define any person by just one thing.

This is a film that is light on story, but heavy on mood, place and character - and as such, it works very well. The film's gorgeous photography and use of music helps to heighten the ambience, and the various neighborhoods of San Francisco are almost characters themselves. It also helps that Fails and Majors give strong leading performances. Their friendship strikes a curious balance - Jimmie is headstrong and determined, while Montgomery is quirky and shy - and is the heart of the film.

The movie is basically composed of two love stories - neither of which are romantic. One involves Jimmie's love for his best friend, while the other revolves around Jimmie's love for the house - an object that he can never truly have. As a story about longtime residents of a city being shoved out by gentrification - a phenomenon I've witnessed in numerous cities - "The Last Black Man in San Francisco" acts as a dirge, albeit one that made me laugh frequently. This film was a bit hit at Sundance this year, and it's easy to see why. Talbot's debut film is one to seek out.