Bowen wrote the film based on her own experience working as a night bookkeeper in a run-down apartment-hotel, incorporating many of the building\u2019s residents into her screenplay, which she brought to life largely with untrained actors. <\/span>Street Music<\/span><\/i> never got much of a release or much notice outside of San Francisco, as at the time the general public wasn\u2019t much concerned about gentrification or its long-term consequences. Bulldozing old buildings to make luxury lofts for millionaires who may never live in them? Pushing families out of their homes to make way for baseball stadiums and fancy coffee houses? <\/span>It was all in the name of progress, right?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Nearly 40 years later, the trickle of gentrification has turned into a roaring faucet that can\u2019t (or won\u2019t) be turned off or ignored, and Bowen\u2019s little-seen, long-out-of-print film now feels like an ominous prelude to director Joe Talbot\u2019s stunning debut feature, <\/span>The Last Black Man in San Francisco<\/i><\/b>, a major hit at Sundance earlier this year. Talbot co-wrote the film with Rob Richert based on a story by first-time actor Jimmie Fails, Talbot\u2019s longtime friend and fellow native San Franciscan. Fails stars as himself (or a version of himself, anyway) in a loose, flowing narrative that inventively blends fact and fiction as it weaves the complicated story of Fails\u2019 family\u2019s diminishing fortune, asking important and hard-to-answer questions about what it means to call a city home.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Many elements in <\/span>The Last Black Man<\/span><\/i> came straight from the real Fails\u2019 memories growing up in his grandfather\u2019s massive and fantastically ornate gingerbread-trimmed Queen Anne\u2013style home. In the film \u2014 and in real life \u2014 Fails\u2019 father eventually lost the family\u2019s house due to his drug addiction, and from there, the family split off and went their separate ways. Jimmie (the character), in particular, has a hard time saying goodbye to the place that held so many of his formative memories, and years later, he and his best friend, Monty (Jonathan Majors), continue to visit, sneaking onto the property to lovingly maintain it, much to the frustration and confusion of the 50-something white couple (personality type: definite NPR listeners) who have since moved in.<\/span><\/p>\n The neighborhood around the house has changed a lot since Jimmie\u2019s childhood, as illustrated via a fantastic scene featuring a cameo by Bay Area punk legend Jello Biafra as the leader of a historical tour (on motorized scooter, no less) who pompously argues with Jimmie over the origins of the house after Jimmie declares to the tour group that his grandfather built it from the studs up, a story Jimmie was told by his irresponsible, often-absent father and has been repeating his entire life without much of a second thought. It\u2019s part of his identity \u2014 something that ties him to the house even when he has no legal claim to it; it\u2019s something he holds on to as he\u2019s sleeping on the floor as a young adult at Monty\u2019s grandpa\u2019s house with nowhere else to go. It\u2019s an attempt to take the narrative back from the gentrifiers \u2014 the kind of people who are constantly saying things like, \u201cWell, this was an Italian neighborhood first anyway\u201d and \u201cThis is just the way it is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n So when the new owners are eventually forced to move out due to an estate battle that\u2019s expected to go on for years, Jimmie sees the opportunity to stealthily take up residence, bringing Monty along as his new roommate. After taking Jimmie\u2019s family\u2019s furniture out of storage at his cousin\u2019s house, they set about returning the home to the way it was when Jimmie was growing up. The roomy house is an oasis \u2014 a place where they can work on their art and feel like themselves. It\u2019s a return to the good-old American dream (long out of reach for most people, especially in a city like San Francisco, where space is at a premium and most people live in cramped rented quarters) \u2014 the dream squandered decades earlier by Jimmie\u2019s father (Rob Morgan, whose performance here is especially powerful and haunting).<\/span><\/p>\n Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra brings a dreamy, often surreal feel to the proceedings that mirrors the deeply idiosyncratic and often nostalgic way Jimmie and Monty \u2014 whose deep friendship, a kind not often seen on screen, makes up the core of the film \u2014 see the city. Their San Francisco is huge and overwhelming, but also small enough that you just might run into a family member you haven\u2019t seen in years while riding a bus across town. Their San Francisco can be soul-crushing and increasingly alienating, but it\u2019s alternatively magical and full of possibilities (and thus hard to leave behind, even when it feels financially impossible to stay). All of this adds up to make <\/span>The Last Black Man in San Francisco<\/span><\/i> as dynamic and weird and memorable as the city itself. Back in 1982, an independent filmmaker named Jenny Bowen made a movie called Street Music, which centered around the working-class […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":568,"featured_media":12095,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/crookedc-01.svg\")
<\/span><\/p>\nGrade: A-<\/span><\/h3>\n
2 hrs.; rated R for language, brief nudity and drug use<\/em><\/h5>\n
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