The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

An artsy movie. Very good story, script, and plot. Excellent cinematography, really shows the beauty of San Francisco. Excellent message on gentrification, homelessness, and love. Very good believable acting. The pacing was a little slow, but overall a very good movie. Overall, I'll give it an 8/10.

Fmovies: I was very disappointed in the movie. It got such great reviews, so I chose to see this over other good sounding films. I guess there's some truth toit, but many things that happen do not seem believable. It's all talking and not very good acting. Much of the dialogue is difficult to understand, and it doesn't need a big screen. Wait until it comes out on DVD.

The San Francisco I knew as a young man was a place with a sense of community and culture that welcomed the adventurous, the imaginative, the creative, and the marginalized. Though, like every other major U.S. city, it was not always a place of harmony, and some neighborhoods had its dangers for outsiders, yet it was a city with a truly diverse population and a rich bohemian culture which has now all but disappeared. Joe Talbot's first feature, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, laments the heart of a city that has been broken by gentrification but celebrates the beauty that remains. Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, and aided by a pensive score by Emile Mossei, the film is an affecting work that is based on Talbot's lifelong friendship with Jimmie Fails who plays a fictional version of himself, a young black man estranged from a place that he once called home.

Winner of the Directing Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, the film opens as two men, Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) and his best friend Montgomery (Jonathan Majors, "Out of Blue") wait impatiently for a bus to take them to the city as a droning preacher (Willie Hen) stands on a soapbox shouting "Remember your truth in the city of façades." It is a message that reverberates throughout the film. Mont and Jimmy are headed to an old Victorian home on Golden Gate Avenue which Jimmie claims his grandfather built in 1946. The house, in what used to be a working class neighborhood, was lost by his father James Sr. (Rob Morgan, "Mudbound") in the 90s and Jimmie is obsessed with getting it back.

With pride, Fails claims that his grandfather was the first black man in San Francisco. Though this is little more than an urban legend, it provides him with a rationale for what he thinks is his historical claim to the house. Much to the chagrin of the older white woman (Maximilienne Ewalt, "Sense8" TV series) who owns the house, Jimmie often comes to touch up the paint on the windows and take care of the lawn but has to duck the fruit the owner throws at him while demanding that he leave the premises. The taciturn Jimmie works part-time as a nursing home attendant and Mont works at a fish market though he is also an artist, writer, and playwright.

Sadly, Jimmie's family is scattered and he has no home. He sleeps on the floor of Mont's house and, in an evening of warmth and friendship, they are shown watching the 1949 San Francisco film noir "D.O.A." on TV together as Montgomery narrates for his blind grandfather (Danny Glover, "The Old Man & the Gun"). Across the street from Mont's house, a group of young macho studs taunt the two friends presumably for their lack of "toughness," but it later becomes clear that much of it is posturing. In two striking scenes, Jimmie travels across the bridge to have some reflective conversations with his Aunt Wanda (Tichina Arnold, "Wild Hogs"), and in a funny but heartbreaking encounter, runs into his mother on the bus but their reunion is as uninvolved as it is fleeting.

To underscore the sense of displacement, Bobby (Mike Epps, "Resident Evil: Extinction"), a friend of James Sr., lives in Jimmie's dad's old car and insists on giving the two friends a ride into town which they reluctantly accept. In a scene that typifies the old spirit of San Francisco, Fails sits on a bench and is joined by a completely nude, older man (David Usner, "Roxie"), a scenario that scarcely rai

The Last Black Man in San Francisco fmovies. The trailer for this movie (which is in itself a wonder) set up some expectations for me, and they were met: it's a melancholy film about a black man feeling pushed away from the city he loves. But the movie is so much something more that I'm still reflecting on it three days after viewing. The film is gentle and expansive, anything but divisive or self-pitying: a celebration of the unique, oddball, all-embracing quirkiness that San Francisco inspires and cultivates. It's just as much about a friendship between black men that endures because of San Francisco's peculiarly protective cover. I came away moved by the friendship story - the kind of friendship that the film itself suggests changes lives and can survive gentrification.

The trailer promises visual beauty and the film delivers, coming as close as a movie can to diagramming the cool, foggy spell San Francisco can cast - but the images on the screen are there to both break a heart and to inspire hope.

And man, are these images beautiful! This movie is a natural addition to the ranks of "Vertigo," "Bullitt," "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Tales of the City" - movies that lean on SF as more than a backdrop, but indeed as a co-star. It all works to underscore why the hero (Jimmie Fails, playing himself) is so compulsively distracted by, even focused on, his unsettled business with his hometown. Set to a dreamy score by Emile Mosseri and Michael Marshall's cover of "If You're Going to San Francisco," there are moments in the movie that well up and stir; that are flat out unforgettable.

This one strikes two big nerves: the crisis of gentrification and displacement happening in San Francisco and other cities across the country; and the general absence in most movies of nuanced presentations of Black masculinity. "The Last Black Man In San Francisco" scores in both cases. It's a beautiful, moving portrait of friendship and a gut-wrenching story of loss. It does what indie films are supposed to do: make us see things differently. The score is gorgeous. The acting, by pros and amateurs, is excellent. (Jonathan Majors is a standout. And check our Rob Morgan's scene.) Above all the movie is different. Unlike just about anything you've ever seen. Quirky, pensive, angry, melancholic. And despite it's sadness, somehow hopeful. Director Joe Talbot and lead actor Jimmie Fails deliver!

I wanted to like this more than I did. While there are some stand-out performances, The Last Black Man in San Francisco isn't all that memorable. You could give it a pass without missing out on anything.