Langston Hughes is mentioned in the middle of The Last Black Man in San Francisco. For those who don’t know, Hughes is one of the great poets of the 20th century, conveying wells of thought and feeling with each poem (“Dream Deferred” is probably my favorite). The Last Black Man in San Francisco is the movie version of a Langston Hughes poem; it is a languid, luscious portrait of a city in flux, in turn creating people in flux, torn between San Francisco’s past and future.
Jimmie Fails (playing himself) repeatedly shows up at this Victorian home with a witch’s hat roof that he does not own, pestering the current owners. See, Jimmie’s grandfather built this house during WWII. When an owner’s dispute leaves the house fallow, Jimmie and his buddy Mont (Jonathan Majors) move all the old items from the house back in, hoping the dispute doesn’t get resolved for a long time. However, that day will eventually come, but Jimmie’s desperation and longing for this homage to his past might cause a rupture for Jimmie that might be too hard to put back together.
If you’re going to make the title of your movie “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” you better make sure you get San Francisco right. Writer/director Joe Talbot capture a version of the city that we’ve been seeing more in recent memory, usually from the Oakland side (Blindspotting, Fruitvale Station). The modes of transportation Jimmie and Mont use: skateboards, borrowed cars, buses, show the divide Jimmy has to cross just to get from a poorer side of the city to a richer side. Talbot finds these diametric opposite shots that capture the city with a single image. Some are big, like Jimmie skateboarding down a hill that a cable car is pulling other people higher up, that might make you tear up. Others are small, like a mostly nude man and Jimmie sitting at a bus stop with a trolley of drunk people mocking….well, it’s hard to say which of them. At time’s Talbot’s San Francisco feels like two words stapled together, at other times it feels like two different world’s. Through beautifully crafted photos and imagery, Talbot convey’s all the complicated feelings San Franciscans feel about their city, and provides a nice backdrop to tell the story of its last black man.
I will say, I think the characters in this movie would scoff at that title and how reductive it is. The big takeaway from The Last Black Man in San Francisco is how people can’t be reduced to just one thing. This viewpoint can be seen in Jimmie and Mont’s relationships with their friends who hang out on street corners. Joe Talbot sets up these scenes that you know the beats to, like an escalating “thug off” on the streets…only to be diffused by crying because something tragic has just happened. Even the douchey real estate agent is pretty sympathetic to Jimmie’s lost cause. However this character complexity is most evident in Jimmie, Mont, and their relationship with each other. Again, Talbot sets it up as something you’ve seen before: two jobless black men hanging out on the street corner. But, as the story progresses, we see the layers and depth of their friendship and how it has informed them as people. Mont uses Jimmie as his creative enabler; we see Mont attempting and failing to write this great play Mont’s got in his head. Jimmie pushes Mont to take that inner whirlwind and put it to paper. On the other side of the coin, Jimmie sees Mont as a loyal comrade in arms, built by poetry and history. That loyalty pushes Jimmie creatively, but also a tad delusionallly. Mont’s slow simmering worry for Jimmie’s unsustainable reality creates this growing tension which Jonathan Majors and Jimmie Fails resolve with extreme emotional catharsis on the film’s big climax that brought me to tears, and I suspect will rivet other moviegoers as well.
Jimmie Fails. Joe Talbot. And especially Jonathan Majors. Remember those names people. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is going to hopefully be remembered as the beginning of a great career for these 3 guys. In the way Alfonso Cuaron made Roma a movie version of a beautiful painting, Talbot, Fails, and Majors turn The Last Black Man in San Francisco into a poem about life in an American city.