There are two worlds. There is the world of order that some of us impose upon the world. It is a world ruled by money but governed by seemingly neutral legal language in which the odds always happen to skew against you. Then there is the world that we actually live in, which is tactile, warm and real, filled with dignity, love and memory. This world actually matters to us, but in the objective world of the mind, it is irrelevant, not a factor. The Last Black Man in San Francisco struggles valiantly to live in the latter. This film visually depicts the tragedy of this dissonance produced from living in these two worlds that underlies all of America, which creates literal and spiritual marginalization, a road to at worst death and at best exile.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is the story of two best friends, Jimmie and Montgomery, and is a story ultimately about dignity and belonging. If Black Panther was the world that we wished that we lived in, this movie depicts the world that we do live in as it feels to live in it. If Wakanda existed, Jimmie would not be interested, but his love can never be reciprocated because it is for a dead, imaginary world. The film is a movie of contrasts: reality versus defiance as joy, a constructive act of creation, making something out of nothing, creating life in the most toxic atmospheres.
If the world sees black people as older and less innocent than they are, then The Last Black Man in San Francisco is not of this world. Even though they are grown men with jobs, their lives seem imbued with (desperate) black boy joy. Their lives are devoted to play and imagination, but it is not a lighthearted game without consequences. The Greek chorus at the corner who possess a veneer of menace and testosterone are their counterpoint, but Montgomery sees them as playing a role, acting grown. They may occupy opposite ends of the spectrum, but they share the same unrooted Raisin in the Sun (there is a constant, tiny visual shout out to Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, which I appreciated) threat.
If you watch The Last Black Man in San Francisco, it initially feels lighthearted and fun. If I seem purposely vague about the plot, I think that it is important to know as little about the movie as possible when seeing it so you can greet it with an open heart instead of with expectations. The film will powerfully affect people who grew up in cities. I’m making the movie sound like a downer, which it is not for the majority of the film, yet it ends on a downbeat. It may initially strike you as a comedy, and it is visually stunning and dynamic. It reminds me of Sorry to Bother You without the surreal elements, but I don’t think that it as perfect as that movie, yet I was left crying during the credits as the soundtrack and sounds of seagulls played over the credits. The implications of the final scene literally triggered a multitude of memories.
I’ve always said that Americans aren’t good at depicting loss and death without cracking jokes or screaming, but The Last Black Man in San Francisco sneaks up on you and addresses both our problem with dealing with complex emotions and succeeds at representing those emotions on screen. Everyone says to dream big, but if there is a trick to existence, it is dreaming loosely while dreaming big instead of holding on to the dream with grim determination so you can live. Dreams can save you, but navigating them can be like the Scylla and Charybdis. They can crush you. The dream and reality of grandfathers, histories, homes are rich or inadequate and shabby depending on what you emphasize and value.
Unlike last year’s Blindspotting, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is never tempted to take the instinctually easy way out. It never dismisses, ridicules or minimizes Jimmie’s desires. To live in this America and act as Jimmie acts, you could be seen as crazy or even suicidal. The dream is contrasted with the reality: a big dream home versus a narrow one, a story of an ideal grandfather versus a real one. There is some common ground: jobs that don’t fully challenge us; lack of a stable nuclear family; the fiction of ownership throughout decades. There is also a swerve theme: initially misreading a scene then readjusting as more information becomes available, getting oriented in an inherently unstable world, understanding the relationships and anticipating the correct reactions and emotions in any situation. There is a sense of foreboding, but the worst always happens out of sight, long ago, when we weren’t there. We just deal with the fallout.
I was struck by the emotional maturity of some scenes, which would ordinarily strike me as ridiculous, but because of the textured emotional honesty and vulnerability of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, instead of scoffing, I found myself recalling exceptions to my hardness and self-protectiveness. Montgomery says, “I don’t get to appreciate them because they’re mean to me. That’s silly.” There are numerous unlikely brief pairings of empathy and solidarity throughout the film. One minute a white woman is hurling groceries at Jimmie, and the next they’re haunting the same spots, trapped in the same temporal reality of love and memory. Montgomery is a kind of Jesus figure in this movie, a literal and figurative fisher of men calling them to redemption and away from death, “Let us push beyond the stories we were born to.” Jimmie overshoots his advice by miles. Montgomery saves no one but himself.
Jimmie and Killmonger are temperamentally very different men with very similar reactions to setbacks for their dreams. If they can’t get what they want, they won’t go back to where they came from, and they won’t adjust to their current circumstances regardless of how ideal they are, but they diverge in their method of exile. Jimmie doesn’t look as far back as Killmonger to the Atlantic or the Motherland. He takes the advice that his grandfather took, “Go West, young man” without the promise of possibility or adventure. We move from a movie filled with community and fellowship to one of isolation and purgatory.
I watched The Last Black Man in San Francisco in the same way that most people watch a horror movie. The innocence and hope of these young men would work in a fantasy, but this is America, and the equation myth of working hard to get what you want was the sword of Damocles hanging over the entire film. Even as a kid, I thought like a lawyer and advised someone with similar dreams, “It isn’t about getting a house. It is about keeping it.” If this movie is the best film of the year in spite of its imperfections, it is because of the emotion behind it and the reality that it depicts in a poetic way. What it lacks in consistency, it excels in earnestness.
