The Last Black Man in San Francisco: Heartfelt and compelling

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity, drug use and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.28.19

Identity and serenity are shaped, in great part, by the stability of place.

Somewhere to call home, where one can shelter from life’s trials and tribulations. Where one can relax, and be at peace.

Mont (Jonathan Majors, left), ubiquitous notebook in hand, worries that Jimmie
(Jimmie Fails) has set his expectations too high, when it comes to his desire to care for a
Victorian house that holds a strong personal attachment.

Indie filmmaker Joe Talbot’s impressive feature debut couldn’t be better timed, arriving amid the rising tsunami of national homelessness: particularly acute in California, and at crisis levels in metropolitan regions such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. It seems exceptionally tragic in Baghdad by the Bay, where tent communities and sidewalk derelicts clash so tragically with the romantic atmosphere and storied neighborhoods of a city that has fueled dreams for generations.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a deeply moving saga of friendship, fractured families, and the devastating hunger to belong — to stillbelong — in a city that seems to have turned its back on native sons and daughters. Talbot, a fifth-generation San Franciscan, co-wrote the story with best friend Jimmie Fails, drawing heavily on the latter’s actual childhood experiences; the script received an assist from Rob Richert, who teaches filmmaking at San Quentin Prison.

The resulting narrative has a firm sense of atmosphere and “street” that feels absolutely — often painfully — authentic. Talbot also grants his characters an aura of grace and nobility, as they pursue an impossible dream with the stubborn persistence of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. The goal is pure, and eminently righteous; this justifies their struggle to a degree that touches us deeply.

And we sense, almost immediately, that the quest — and its outcome — will be heartbreaking. This is no Hollywood fairy tale.

Jimmie Fails (essentially playing himself) has long been obsessed by the ramshackle, elegant old Victorian home — complete with a distinctive, cone-shaped rooftop known as a “Witch’s Hat” — that his grandfather built long ago, in the heart of San Francisco’s Fillmore District. It was home to Jimmie’s extended family, during the vibrant post-WWII years, when the region was alive with joyously boisterous jazz clubs.

Then Jimmie’s father lost it somehow — details don’t matter — and the family fractured, pushed to various parts of the city’s outskirts. Jimmie remains haunted by the house’s hold on his soul. With best friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) acting as reluctant lookout, Jimmie frequently sneaks onto the property, to touch up some paint trim, or attempt to control the overgrown garden.

Despite the fact that the current owners — white, of course — have repeatedly chased him away.

Jimmie is aimless, shiftless, restless, rootless: a lost soul whose identity is locked in an upstairs bedroom of the house he’s no longer able to enter. Fails is richly nuanced in this, his big-screen acting debut; he’s by turns proud, defiant, vulnerable and emotionally shattered. And, above all else, agitated: as if he’s being consumed from within, by something he needs to tame, and control.

Jimmie isn’t quite a whole human being, and Fails unerringly nails this sense of incompleteness, of a moth unable to stop circling the fading light of his former home.

Majors’ Mont, in great contrast, is a quiet, gentle soul: not quite in synch with the hustle and bustle of big-city life. He works as a fishmonger, and lives with his Grandpa Allen (Danny Glover) in the latter’s comfortable old house, in another part of the city. Their relationship is deeply touching; Allen, all but blind, loves “watching” old movies on TV, intently listening to the dialog as Mont narrates the visual action.

Mont is a quintessential San Francisco character: a would-be playwright forever sketching and scribbling in a red notebook he never relinquishes. He acts out scenes on a dilapidated dock at Hunter’s Point, at times bursting into passionate imitations of the street preachers and other colorful personalities who inhabit the region. Majors’ delicately shaded performance suggests that Mont might be slightly on the spectrum, or perhaps he simply keeps close counsel: silently watching and waiting for just the right opportunity for a significant statement or gesture.

As we meet them, Jimmie is sleeping on the floor of Mont’s bedroom, having been welcomed by Allen. The two young men have been inseparable for weeks or years — doesn’t matter which — and Mont often follows in Jimmie’s wake: a serene, somehow regal chaperone.

Their movements are clocked by a rowdy Greek chorus of five shifty young men who hang out on the sidewalk across the street from Grandpa Allen’s house: Kofi (Jamal Trulove), Stunna (Jordan Gomes), Gunna (Isiain Lalime), Fresh (Jeivon Parker ) and Nitty (Antoine Redus). They’re watchful, wary and confrontational, but nonetheless accepting of Jimmie and Mont. Their banter and byplay — like so much else of this film — sounds and feels absolutely genuine; it’s as if Talbot secretly filmed the quintet from a clandestine spot close by.

Then, an unexpected development: Something goes amiss with the Victorian’s residents, who wind up in some sort of ownership squabble. They move out, leaving the place abandoned. Jimmie can’t believe his luck; he visits his aunt (Tichina Arnold, engagingly feisty) and retrieves some long-stored furniture. He and Mont then break into the house, fill a few rooms with enough to make the place feel cozy, and — just like that — Jimmie has the home he has long dreamed about. And if they’re squatters, so what? He has more right than most, to be in this house.

We know it can’t last: not in a neighborhood where such homes routinely sell for $4 million. 

To say nothing of the jolting — but completely credible — plot twist that erupts in the third act.

Talbot’s film is equal parts character drama and reverential valentine to San Francisco: a depiction deftly conveyed by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra’s captivating and wistful tableaus. Some of the establishing shots are breathtaking, and not necessarily in the sense of the city’s more majestic neighborhoods. 

Several powerful sequences silently follow Jimmie on his transportation mode of choice — a skateboard — while he navigates the city’s streets. One of the best is a distant shot that watches Jimmie as he slaloms back and forth, down a particularly steep hill; Newport-Berra slowly pulls back, to widen the shot, and the scene is oddly fascinating.

San Francisco is as strong a character as the scores of colorful individuals who populate this story (the cast laden equally with famous locals and indie darlings such as Jello Biafra and Thora Birch). Talbot shades the story in a manner that suggests the city is as aggrieved as Jimmie and his friends, at the callous manner in which “progress” and gentrification have destroyed once-culturally vibrant neighborhoods. 

The villains are both unseen — indifference, distant political maneuvering — and fleetingly visible: most notably when a cable car filled with drunk, jeering, dot-com jerks slides past, as a reminder of the newest assault on San Francisco’s property values.

But the city cannot act, to halt such a casually cruel invasion; it can only be acted upon. 

The Last Man in San Francisco is a thoughtful, quietly powerful drama: a sympathetic acknowledgment of those who cling desperately, defiantly to something — a place, a way of life, family bonds — inexorably destined to slip away. Talbot and editor David Marks maintain a leisurely, measured pace, although it might feel too slow for some viewers.

This approach is vindicated, because Majors, Fails and the city itself never fail to hold our attention. Few films achieve a level one could call poetic; this is one of them.