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'The Last Black Man in San Francisco' marks extraordinary film debut

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” - ★ ★ ★ ★

Some movies tell you a story. Others invite you into a dream. “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” an extraordinary debut from best friends and collaborators Jimmie Fails and Joe Talbot, obeys the intuitive rhythms of a reverie, leading viewers on a graceful journey through the collective memory of a city and the deeply personal aspirations of one of its dispossessed.

A lyrical, visually stunning tone poem to loss, lies, reclamation and making peace with the past, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” virtually defies conventional description.

It opens with the strains of a lilting woodwind musical score, as a little girl holding a lollipop skips past a street preacher who has climbed up on a milk crate to inveigh against the pollution poisoning the San Francisco Bay. Beholding the scene are Fails — playing a character named Jimmie Fails — and his best friend Mont (Jonathan Majors), an aspiring playwright who lives with his grandfather (Danny Glover) in the city's Hunter's Point neighborhood.

Fails is staying with them for the time being while he nurses his life's ambition: to move back into the glorious, slightly shabby Victorian home in the Fillmore district that his grandfather designed and built back in the 1940s. “I want to drink coffee and scratch my eyes while I read the paper,” Jimmie says longingly, in one of the film's simplest and most touching soliloquies.

When the house's owners are away, Jimmie and Mont sneak in to fix the place up, making small repairs and repainting its trim.

Slender and endowed with an open, expressive face the camera loves, Fails is a natural on the screen, exuding a beatific presence that earns immediate empathy. He and Majors enjoy an easy camaraderie, as Jimmie and Mont respond to circumstances that put the house enticingly within their reach.

Talbot — who grew up with Fails in San Francisco, and who won a prize at Sundance for directing “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” — blends a documentarian's feel for the realities of his hometown with dashes of surrealism and playful affection. Within the life story of one young man trying to rescue his past and claim a right of return, the filmmaker finds an epic history that encompasses postwar migration, the flourishing of the “Harlem of the West,” the Haight Ashbury in the '60s, redlining, gentrification, environmental racism and the chronic policing of black masculinity.

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” unfolds episodically, in gauzy, poetic images and vignettes that can be heartbreaking at one moment and quirkily comic the next.

Through it all, Fails maintains a serene and poignant presence, skateboarding from situation to situation with (usually) impenetrable calm. There's one whopper of a twist in “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” that lifts an already elevated enterprise into something heady and more provocative.

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” is about many, many things, but ultimately it's about having the courage to transcend history, with all of its burdens, gifts and most consoling myths. Even when Talbot and Fails risk unraveling the film's most cherished verities, they do so with the mesmerizing grace of a skateboard gliding down Lombard Street.

• • •

Starring: Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Danny Glover

Directed by: Joe Talbot

Other: An A24 release. Rated R for language, nudity and drug use. 120 minutes

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