*Critics have fallen in love with “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” which VOX writer Alissa Wilkinson describes as a “portrait” of the city but also a tale about “dislocation and change and friendship.”
Directed and produced by Joe Talbot based on a story by Jimmie Fails and Talbot, the pic stars Fails, Jonathan Majors, Danny Glover, Tichina Arnold, Rob Morgan, Mike Epps, Finn Wittrock and Thora Birch. The plot centers Jimmie’s efforts to reclaim his childhood home, a Victorian house in the Fillmore District, which was built by his grandfather.
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.@A24 presents #TheLastBlackManInSanFrancisco, directed by Joe Talbot and starring Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, and @MrDannyGlover. pic.twitter.com/r2JOcy3wt6
— The Last Black Man in San Francisco (@LastBlackManSF) March 21, 2019
Here’s the official synopsis via Cinema Blend:
Jimmie Fails dreams of reclaiming the Victorian home his grandfather built in the heart of San Francisco. Joined on his quest by his best friend Mont, Jimmie searches for belonging in a rapidly changing city that seems to have left them behind. As he struggles to reconnect with his family and reconstruct the community he longs for, his hopes blind him to the reality of his situation. (Based on Jimmie Fails’ true story)
A wistful odyssey populated by skaters, squatters, street preachers, playwrights, and other locals on the margins, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a poignant and sweeping story of hometowns and how they’re made—and kept alive—by the people who love them. Joe Talbot’s directorial debut is a deep and resonant meditation on the stories we tell ourselves to find our place in the world.
Below are highlights from Wilkinson review of the film:
Most of all, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a love letter — not a romantic one, but the kind you write when you can no longer hold on to a relationship that nonetheless shaped you profoundly. Richly textured and vividly rendered, it’s clearly the fruit of a lifelong love.
Fails and Talbot, San Francisco natives who’ve been friends for more than a decade, wrote the film’s story partly based on Fails’s life. And though those experiences have clearly been smoothed out into a fictionalized film, it still feels like nonfiction. Fails, after all, plays a character named … Jimmie Fails.
Jimmie lives (or really, crashes) with his friend Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) and Montgomery’s grandfather (Danny Glover) in a cramped apartment on the outskirts of town. The two of them belong in this neighborhood; it’s their home. But they also seem like outsiders. A group of young men across the street (credited as the “Greek chorus”) makes fun of them whenever they venture outside. Montgomery spends days scribbling in a notebook, trying to write a play. Jimmie, who spent part of his childhood homeless and living in a car with his father, can’t locate a good job.
The pair often head over to a house in the gentrifying Fillmore District, a part of San Francisco that was previously dubbed the “Harlem of the West.” Jimmie’s family home is there, but it’s been out of his family for a long while. It’s out of place in the neighborhood, with 19th-century architecture, supposedly built by Jimmie’s grandfather in 1946, and Jimmie loves it more than anything. He keeps sneaking over to paint it and water the plants and tend to it, to the consternation of the white couple who’ve owned it for more than a decade.
Then they move out, and Jimmie hatches a plan with Montgomery to take it back, to recapture the only place where he’s felt at home.
We see a San Francisco in the throes of change, yet the film concerns itself with that change mainly through the eyes of Jimmie, who loves it and notices every small, odd detail. It feels as much like a document of a place as a narrative film.
Read the full review here.
“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” opens in theaters today, June 7.
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