The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Based on the real life expe­ri­ences of San Fran­cis­co native Jim­mie Fails – who plays a ver­sion of him­self in the film – Joe Talbot’s Sun­dance sen­sa­tion, The Last Black Man in San Fran­cis­co, con­stant­ly walks a thin and wob­bly line between real­i­ty and fic­tion, the lit­er­al and the sym­bol­ic, the obvi­ous and the sub­tle. Every day, Fails rides his skate­board across town and goes to take care of a house that isn’t his own and which he isn’t sup­posed to have any access to.

Though it is cur­rent­ly occu­pied by a white cou­ple, Fails claims that it was orig­i­nal­ly built from scratch by his grand­fa­ther, ​“the first black man in San Fran­cis­co”. As spi­ralling gen­tri­fi­ca­tion push­es the black com­mu­ni­ty fur­ther away from the cen­tre of the city and eras­es traces of its his­to­ry, Fails clings to this house. He ded­i­cates his young life to return­ing this fam­i­ly heir­loom to who he believes are its right­ful owners.

The gor­geous home there­fore becomes a sym­bol of resis­tance against the eco­nom­ic dis­en­fran­chise­ment of black peo­ple in San Fran­cis­co, and it also becomes an exam­ple of the shift­ing cul­tur­al sands. This bal­ance between what the house is (lit­er­al­ly) and what it means (polit­i­cal­ly, cul­tur­al­ly, eco­nom­i­cal­ly) is already enough to give the view­er full-blown ver­ti­go. But the film ful­ly leans into this strat­e­gy, adopt­ing a visu­al style which, in the same way, jux­ta­pos­es extreme­ly stylised and colour­ful shots, with stark realism.

Even when focused on a small group of young men who every day stand on the same side­walk talk­ing the same trash to one anoth­er, the scene is staged like a piece of the­atre, with each char­ac­ter care­ful­ly posi­tioned across the frame, in a com­po­si­tion to rival those of the great Renais­sance painters. Most of these styl­is­tic flour­ish­es come from the eye of Mont­gomery Allen (Jonathan Majors), Fails’ eccen­tric best friend. Always on the look­out for inspi­ra­tion, he direct­ly inte­grates the peo­ple he encoun­ters into the plays writes – to him, they are peo­ple just as much as they are sym­bols and characters.

This inter­play between an almost doc­u­men­tary authen­tic­i­ty and obvi­ous­ly sculpt­ed polit­i­cal alle­gor­i­cal, then between fic­tion and real­i­ty, imbue the film with an odd inten­si­ty. The expe­ri­ence of watch­ing the film is no less than dizzy­ing, and its rapid pace, main­tained almost with­out inter­rup­tion through­out, can at times be a lit­tle exhaust­ing. But the real weak­ness of the film lies in the way it often heav­i­ly relies on the right­eous­ness of its argu­ment to pull on our heart-strings. Espe­cial­ly lat­er on in the sto­ry, big emo­tion­al moments come across as unnec­es­sary and dis­ap­point­ing short­cuts, in a work which, up until then, appeared to promise some­thing more com­plex and nuanced.

These short­com­ings also reflect bad­ly on the rest of the film: could it be this was just a great sto­ry, told with a visu­al style that sug­gest­ed more than it could actu­al­ly deliv­er? The cli­max, which should not be spoiled here, has many impli­ca­tions for the var­i­ous themes addressed by the film – gen­tri­fi­ca­tion and black iden­ti­ty chief among them – but these appear side­lined in favour of a more obvi­ous and sen­ti­men­tal sign-off.