Mark Reviews Movies: THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 20, 2019

"Home" can mean many things. It's a building, of course—the actual edifice where one lives. It's also the people within that house—family or those who have become so much like family that the difference is only genetic. It can be a community, in which everyone has the same or similar ZIP codes or area codes or goals or jobs, and it could be an entire city, where people take pride in the landmarks, the sports teams, the cultural institutions, and the nicknames and descriptions that give the place and its residents a distinct personality.

Jimmie Fails, the protagonist of The Last Black Man in San Francisco (the character named after the film's star, who also developed the semi-autobiographical story upon which it is based), has a notion of all of these things. Having lost them, though, he now only has an idea of the concept of home to which to cling.

He once had a house, where he lived with his father and mother, before things went bad for the family. Since then, he has lived in an abandoned warehouse, a car, and, when the options with a roof ran out, a group home. He did have a family once. His father (played by Rob Morgan) now lives in cramped apartment, where he packages bootleg DVDs of decades-old movies, and the two men don't really talk. His mother (played in a brief cameo by Fails' actual mother) left and got a job—a new life in which her ex-husband and son are only a memory. He has an aunt (played by Tichina Arnold), but she lives out in the country with a younger boyfriend.

As for those he could consider so much like family that they basically are, Jimmie now lives with Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) and his friend's grandpa (Danny Glover). Close quarters, though, do not necessarily make a family. While Montgomery is basically the closest thing Jimmie has to a family member now, his friend is busy with writing plays and, when the three men are at the house, taking care of his blind grandfather. There comes a point when gramps makes it clear that he doesn't consider Jimmie to be part of the family, and from the start, when he's sitting on the floor while the other two are comfortable on the couch, it's clear that Jimmie has sensed this sentiment for some time.

As for the neighborhood, he knows it but doesn't quite understand it. A group of men stand outside Montgomery's house all day and night, and they mock Jimmie and his friend. The neighborhood isn't so much falling apart as it's mutating, with men in hazmat suits cleaning up some unseen mess and Montgomery receiving a surprise visitor while sitting in a dinghy—a fish that jumps into the boat and has an extra eye.

As for the hometown of San Francisco, it has left behind the black population some time ago, sending them to neighborhoods like the one where Jimmie stays. In an early shot, director Joe Talbot has Jimmie, riding his skateboard from the city proper to his area down a street, passing by signifiers of notable cultural change. It's technically the same place, but Jimmie might as well be traveling to another world.

There used to be a "Harlem of the West" in the city, where Jimmie spent at least some of his life. Now, the area has been gentrified, and the white occupants of his former house don't even bother to clean, keep up the exterior, or maintain the garden in the backyard. Jimmie does that work when the couple is away. They don't know how good they have it, because they've always had it good enough.

That house is the heart of the film—indeed, the heart of the main character. It's a very fine building, modeled after architecture that was, according to Jimmie's understanding of the house's history, almost 100 years out of fashion. It was built by Jimmie's grandfather, the second man in the family line to have that name, after returning from World War II. The neighborhood previously was populated by people of Japanese heritage. The grandfather refused to take the home of people who had been interred during the war, so he bought some land and built the house himself. When the couple presently occupying it is kicked out over a matter of inheritance, Jimmie decides to take up residency there—to reclaim his house, his heritage, his past, his present, his future, his home.

Describing the plot of the film is almost pointless, because it's more about the mood of searching for even a smidgen of hope amidst the feeling of being isolated from one's senses of self and belonging to something greater than oneself. Through bold uses of color and the sometimes absurdist tone of the screenplay (written by the director and Rob Richert), Talbot presents this story with the air of a fable (The title basically shouts that). Still, this approach never undermines the very real concerns on display—from gentrification, to a not-so-stealthy kind of segregation happening in the city, to violence, to ways in which certain communities are mostly left to fail, to the feeling of losing or never being at ease with one's identity.

The result feels of a specific place and time, but more to the point, it feels as if this could be anywhere and right now—at this moment and for the foreseeable future. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a lovely, mournful tone poem about longing for home—wherever, however, and with whomever one can find it.

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