Butler's Cinema Scene

Jimmie Falls (at right)

“THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO” My rating: B 

121 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Less a conventional narrative than an extended tone poem, Joe Talbot’s “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” is bursting at the seams with color, movement and, quite often, stillness.

It dabbles in big contemporary issues (race, gentrification, crime, dead-end machismo, the changing urban landscape) but never makes a big statement, preferring just to sit back and soak it all up.

Most of all it’s the story of a friendship between two men — African American men — who share a dream against the odds.

In a sense, this is a love story about a man and a house.  Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) is quietly obsessed with a Victorian gingerbread home on one of San Francisco’s scenic streets. He has been told — and he absolutely believes — that this imposing structure was hand-built by his grandfather in the late 1940s.

The family somehow lost the property, but now Jimmie is determined to get it back.  He’s so committed to this project that he frequently sneaks onto the property when the current owners aren’t around to paint and make repairs.

Sharing his vision is his best friend Montgomery (Jonathan Majors). Montgomery is a fish monger by trade, a playwright by avocation.  (Neither of these guys is dumb, which makes their devotion to the cause all the more touching.)

Currently Jimmie is living with Montgomery and the latter’s blind grandpa (Danny Glover); a typical night at home usually involves an old noir movie with Montgomery providing a running commentary on the action so the old man can appreciate the visuals he can no longer see.

Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, and Danny Glover

The screenplay (credited to Talbot, Fails and Rob Richert) isn’t big on plot twists or major surprises. The house’s current owners fall into default, and while the property is vacant Jimmie and Montgomery move in (how is it that two squatters have just the right period-specific furniture and decor with which to outfit their new digs?).  After a while the house becomes a character in its own right, what with a fully-functioning pipe organ and a secret wood-paneled room accessed by a bookcase/door.

Common sense tells us that the house is clearly at least 100 years old, but Jimmie stubbornly clings to the family legend. He makes a stab at purchasing the building, but how’s a guy who works as an aide at a nursing home going to afford even the down payment on a $4 million property?

But story really isn’t what “Last Black Man…” is about. It’s about mood, about small observations of life, about soaking up the details of the cityscape.

Talbot’s camera often glides effortlessly alongside Jimmie as he skateboards around the city.  The faces of San Franciscans float in and out of view.

There’s even a Greek chorus of tattooed neighborhood guys who hang outside Montgomery’s grandpa’s house;  they think they represent the ultimate in black male macho, but they haven’t the bite to go along with their barking. They’re human placeholders on the sidewalk of life. (They remind of the sidewalk philosophers of Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”)

“Last Black Man” isn’t easy movie watching. It challenges and defies convention and is imbued with equal parts whimsey and woe. Once seen, it will not easily be forgotten.

| Robert W. Butler