Jimmie (newcomer Jimmie Fails) loves a Victorian house. The rollercoaster affair between our hero and said gothic pile is at the heart of an urban comedy that, like Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, is at once self-conscious, politically engaged, sci-fi weird and accessible.
A semi-autobiographical project, it deserves to turn Fails and the film’s director, his childhood friend Joe Talbot, into stars. Fails is black. Talbot is white. And both men, clearly, know the streets of San Francisco by heart. We don’t see fast cars — we see a tatty car that doubles as a home.
We also see a skateboard that allows Jimmie and his best friend Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) to climb and sail down the city’s hills. Plus vagrants, one of them stark naked, stumbling between bus stops, much to the amusement of tourists. You keep expecting Jimmie to fall in love with a kooky girl or get caught up in a gun battle. But Fails and Talbot avoid all the cliché (at least until the third act, when Montgomery starts to feel more like a holy fool than a human being).
Joni Mitchell warbles on the soundtrack. The floorboards in Jimmie’s huge house creak like the quarters of a haunted ship. The men behind The Last Black Man in San Francisco aren’t trying to be cool or sleek. That’s the last thing on their minds and probably explains why they do such a fine job of standing out from the crowd.
