Review: 'The Last Black Man in San Francisco' is an indie gem

Posted Tuesday, August 27, 2019 at 4:00 PM Central

by John Couture

The Sundance Film Festival is the annual proclamation of everything that is cool in indie cinema. Of course, it has changed greatly since its founding in 1978 and many naysayers claim that it has sold out and become the exact commercial behemoth upon which it was set up to fight against.

I'm certainly not one to get in the middle of that fight, but I can tell you that reliably some of my favorite films each year come out of Sundance. Whether they are true indies or not is hardly the point, right? Regardless, the indie spirit continues to live on and The Last Black Man in San Francisco is the latest example of a film that clearly found a much larger audience thanks to the film festival.

Two friends in San Francisco aspire to reclaim the Victorian home that one of their grandfathers built in the heart of the city. Unfortunately, their family was forced out of the home in the 1990s and the intervening gentrification has priced the home out of their reach, to the tune of $4 million. But that doesn't stop the friends from squatting on a past that may not be precisely what they were told.

I have long asserted that A24 has become the premiere indie distributor. They have a unique eye for cinematic excellence and they are more than filling the void left by the implosion of the Weinstein company. With The Last Black Man in San Francisco, they have once again curated an important film that not only celebrates an area that has been tragically underserved in recent years but does so with such aplomb.

Like any good indie film worth its salt, The Last Black Man in San Francisco mines several hot-button topics with austere witticisms that bite to the heart of the matter. The overriding theme in the film is gentrification and how our identity is shaped by our experiences, both perceived and real. To that end, the film plays with racial identity in a way that comes back and bites itself with an ironic twist that I never saw coming.

The movie is the feature debut from writer-director Joe Talbot who won the U.S. Dramatic Directing Awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The lead actor Jimmie Fails plays a character called Fails and it's not hard to see that he has sprinkled many truisms into the film with frequent collaborator Talbot. Much like the pair at the heart of the film, these two filmmakers strive to leave their mark on an industry that in many ways has turned its back on them.

There's an easy comparison to be made to Spike Lee and his debut film She's Gotta Have It (and the parallels are certainly there), but Talbot is able to convey something more with his film than Spike was able to do at that point in his career. Perhaps it was the trails that Spike blazed for him, but there's just a certain weight that Talbot is able to deliver with The Last Black Man in San Francisco that took Spike several years and films to hit.

That's not to say that Joe Talbot is better than Spike Lee, but he does have a certain head start that his characters in his movie didn't enjoy. What he's able to accomplish with that head start remains to be seen, but if this film is any indication, Talbot is well on his way to becoming a filmmaking stud in his own right.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is now available on Blu-ray and DVD.