‘The Last Black Man’ in a city being gentrified
The buddy comedy “Papi Chulo” could go wrong in all sorts of ways, so it’s kind of a minor miracle how much it actually gets right. Funny, empathetic and tender, it pretty much sneaks up and catches you off-guard with its sly charms. ❚ Matt Bomer plays Sean, a handsome Los Angeles weatherman who owns an expensive house with a great view. It’s been six months since his last relationship ended, and he breaks down crying during a mortifying broadcast. “An intense case of acid reflux,” he tells his boss, attempting to downplay the incident.
‘Papi Chulo’
“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” wastes no time hypnotizing the viewer with a visual wit as bold as its title. A cute little black girl, all carefree innocence, stops dead in her tracks, coming face to face with a white man in a hazmat suit, cleaning the toxic streets on which she skips.
In this psychic bedlam a street preacher raves atop a milk crate, directly addressing the camera. “They got plans for us,” he says, the men in hazmat suits milling about the polluted water of the Bay. “Fight for your home!”
For Jimmie Fails (the character and the actor who plays him share the same
‘The Last Black Man in San Francisco’
Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Danny Glover.
R for language, brief nudity and drug use.
At Harkins Camelview at Fashion Square.
Great Fair Joe Talbot.
Bad
Good Bomb
name), that fight is literal, the home in question a stately Victorian in the Fillmore District that his grandfather built
and his family lost. In a neighborhood that was once so diverse it was dubbed the “Harlem of the West,” Jimmie’s beloved house has been inhabited for the past 12 years by a white couple.
Obsessed still with the house, Jimmie haunts it, much to the consternation of its owners, touching up the trim and weeding the garden while they’re out on errands, determined it be kept up until it’s again his — pure delusion, in a city where the median home price is over $1 million.
When he’s not doing light repairs on somebody else’s house, Jimmie’s bunking with his best friend, Mont (Jonathan Majors), and his Grandpa Allen (Danny Glover), dreaming his big dreams from a mattress on the floor. Mont is sweet and bookish, a playwright with a pencil lodged behind his ear, and Jimmie’s partner in crime.
When an estate issue leaves the house suddenly vacant, Jimmie seizes the opportunity and moves in with Mont, claiming its stained-glass, intricate ornamental molding, columns and ceiling murals for his own.
“Last Black Man” teems with characters who give the city its color, both literal and figurative: a Greek chorus of black men who hold court outside Mont’s house, a man living in a car festooned with Christmas lights, another homeless man singing soul-stirring opera on the street.
These are the people who made San Francisco, whose blood pumps through its lore but can no longer afford to live there. They’re mocked by their displacers, who take Segway-guided home tours and drunkenly party on packed street cars to remixes of Jefferson Airplane, plastic Solo cups in hand. This is a poem of a city transformed, a paean to something lost. The city is captured in rhythmic slow motion set to a score that’s by turns euphoric and heartbreaking. In snatches, it stuns.
There are so many lovely individual elements, more’s the pity that they don’t cohere into a resounding triumph. “Last Black Man” is two hours of a feeling, one that it can’t sustain through beauty alone.
Jimmie and Mont are held at an emotional arm’s length, distant in their strangeness in a film already pitched to absurdity. Even when the film delights, one wonders: What is all this creative lunacy adding up to? Each brushstroke builds momentum to a release that never comes, its climactic moment landing with a dramatic shrug.
Still, “Last Black Man” pulses with undeniable energy and the promise of other, even better films to come. As director Joe Talbot’s first movie, it’s impossible to imagine it will be his last.