Review: The Last Black Man in San Francisco Is an Offbeat Elegy for the Past

Joe Talbot's film is a melancholic reflection on gentrification and urban black experience.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Photo: A24

“Remember your truth in the city of façades,” a soapbox preacher (Willie Hen) declares in the opening scene of The Last Black Man in San Francisco. His words, however droll, will become the moral of Joe Talbot’s offbeat fable of urban “renewal.” The man is standing on a milk crate in front of a contamination site near a black community in San Francisco Bay, where cleanup crews dressed in Hazmat suits attend to some unspecified toxic event. Across the street from him, Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) and Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) wait at an overgrown bus stop for a local bus into the city. Unmoved by the preacher’s meandering protest against environmental injustice, and sick of waiting for that damned bus, the pair jump onto Jimmie’s skateboard and skate their way into the city.

In the sequence that follows, the pair cuts a funny figure, and only in part because these two grown men can’t quite fit onto that skateboard. They also look a bit old for such hijinks; not for nothing does their antagonist, Bobby (Mike Epps), later refer to Mont’s “young, old-looking ass.” Jimmie and Mont’s friendship has an immature quality to it—trusting, sincere, and intimate in a way that contrasts with Bobby and his boisterous friends, who are perpetually outside Mont’s dad’s (Danny Glover) house talking shit. And fittingly, the two friends still hold on to the dreams and anxieties of childhood, as they’re headed into the city because Jimmie makes it a point to touch up the paint on the exterior of his childhood home on Golden Gate Avenue, which his family lost possession of in the 1990s.

In its opening scene, The Last Black Man in San Francisco simultaneously announces itself as an expressive portrait of a city, an endearing ode to male comradery, a leisurely paced hangout flick, an absurdist comedy, and a melancholic reflection on gentrification and urban black experience. Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra’s photography presents a San Francisco summer as a heightened reality, a dreamlike zone of fog, sunshine, and income disparity. The film’s vision of San Francisco, seen through the eyes of people who are both insiders and outsiders, may be something of an outlandish exaggeration, but it’s the kind of hyperbole that could only have come from the observations of a native: “You can only hate San Francisco if you love it,” as Jimmie says to a white yuppie (Thora Birch) on the bus.

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Jimmie likes to tell people that his grandfather built the house on Golden Gate in 1946, buying an empty lot and building on it because he didn’t feel comfortable buying a home in an area vacated by the forced relocation of people of Japanese descent to internment camps. Now the home is owned by an older white woman (Maximilienne Ewalt) who pelts Jimmie with produce when she finds him maintaining its red trim without her permission. The legend that the house is his grandfather’s handiwork gives Jimmie a historical and moral claim to the building that he feels supersedes the arbitrary ownership determined by real-estate exchanges.

The broader history of city neighborhoods altered by institutional racism is the backdrop of the tragedy that split Jimmie’s family apart and dispossessed them of their house. The film doesn’t have its characters hold forth on the racism of the housing market, but the presence of racism is about as hard to miss as the workers in the Hazmat suits ambling around in the background of Mont’s neighborhood. A heartfelt performance by Fails as a young man constantly suppressing the pain of being excluded from the only place he loves —of coping with hating San Francisco and his father (Rob Morgan) and mother, at the same time that he deeply loves all of them—renders the impact of San Francisco’s grotesque real-estate boom on its communities of color unmistakable and poignant.

Later in the film, when possession of the old Victorian-style house ends up in limbo because of an inheritance dispute, Jimmie seizes on the opportunity: He and Mont move his grandfather’s old stuff into the place and become squatters, living a fantasy of midcentury black middle-class life in one of America’s most expensive neighborhoods. Mont, a socially awkward aspiring writer who dons the shabby business-casual attire of a ’50s-era playwright, is inspired by Jimmie’s project to reclaim his grandfather’s property. As the two lounge about the house, Jimmie begins feverishly writing a play, which eventually becomes a way of making himself confront the impossibility of returning to his largely imagined past.

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Jimmie’s problem—the problem of being the last black man in San Francisco, or at least in one of its expensive neighborhoods—is how to hold on to a past everyone else denies exists, without losing yourself in it. His struggle recalls the words of the preacher, who urges his theoretically black, but functionally nonexistent, audience to hold on to the value of their own experience in this absurdly skewed world, because the official culture isn’t recording it.

Score: 
 Cast: Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Danny Glover, Mike Epps, Rob Morgan, Tichina Arnold, Finn Wittrock, Thora Birch, Maximilienne Ewalt, Willie Hen  Director: Joe Talbot  Screenwriter: Joe Talbot, Rob Richert  Distributor: A24  Running Time: 120 min  Rating: R  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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