Movie Review: The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Goldie Eder, LICSW, BCD

“You don’t get to hate it until you love it,” says Jimmie Fails (playing himself), a protagonist in the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco (directed by Joe Talbot and written by Fails and Rob Richert). Jimmie says this to two white women he encounters on a bus near the end of the film, who are complaining about San Francisco, to which they have recently moved. This is Jimmie’s emotional truth, as the young man with the broken heart expresses his feeling about his home, San Francisco. Jimmie, we learn, has basically been struggling on his own since at least adolescence, spending some time in a group home, and never really settling into a place he can call home. We meet him at the start of the film crashing with and sleeping next to the bed of his friend Mont Allen (the amazing actor Jonathan Majors), who in turn lives with his blind grandfather, Grandpa Allen (played by the ever compelling Danny Glover). Jimmie and Mont tire of perpetually waiting for the bus and they set off via skateboard and on foot across San Francisco to the neighborhood where Jimmie lived for the first six years of his life: the splendid Victorian manse, an old “painted lady” with a “witch hat.” Although Jimmie’s father long ago lost the house his grandfather either built or owned in 1947, Jimmie cannot accept this loss, and lovingly restores the paint and tends the garden, despite an older white couple now owning and living in the house. The surreal filming of the city and the elegiac music get us feeling the love that Jimmie and Mont do toward San Francisco.

Eventually, though, the couple loses the house and Jimmie cannot resist the temptation to occupy the family homestead. He and Mont rescue the old furniture and vintage objects from his aunt’s house and joyfully run, scream, schwitz and play in the house, restoring it to the happy place Jimmie remembers from childhood (minus his parents fighting). But their happiness cannot last, as a realtor eventually puts the house up for sale for a cool $4,000,000, a price way out of reach for our heroes who work in a retirement home and sell fish for minimum or close to it wage. The price does not deter Jimmie from approaching a mortgage lender about his prospects, but he fails to win the guy over, as one might have in a film from the 1940s. However, they decide that Mont will produce and perform his newly written play in the house before they have to give it up. Much of the neighborhood witnesses the awkward, uncomfortable scene of Mont unmasking Jimmie’s delusions, and people walk out. Weirdly enough, Jimmie seems to accept Mont’s pronouncements, and ultimately reconciles with Mont, returning briefly to Mont’s grandpa’s house, the two friends watching another old movie with Grandpa.  But the next morning, Jimmie has moved on. Why indeed does Jimmie leave?  Is his heart broken? Is this another attachment injury?  Is Jimmie’s rootlessness without his beloved house just too much to bear?

Come hear the ideas of Gary Bailey, MSW, ACSW. Gary is Assistant Dean for Community Engagement and Social Justice, Professor of Practice of Social Work, and Director of the Urban Leadership Program at Simmons College School of Social Work, and an internationally recognized and respected social work professional leader. Gary will be helping us plumb the mysteries and celebrate the lush poetry of this remarkable film that deserves to be experienced collectively.