Man. This movie. A24. Once again, you have blown me away. The music, the storyline, the acting, the scenes. Just. Wow.
This film is so powerful for so many reasons, the main one being that it is about a very serious issue: gentrification. I first heard about gentrification when I was in college, because some of my friends who lived in New York City were talking about it gentrifying. For one of my Africana Studies courses, I interviewed a classmate about the gentrification of Flatbush. I also had heard about it from a skit by Saturday Night Live called “Bushwick, Brooklyn,” which pokes fun at the gentrification of Bushwick. In the skit three Black men (played by Kenan Thompson, Kevin Hart, and Jay Pharaoh) are standing on the street corner talking about what they did over the week. Kevin’s character says he went to the new artisanal mayonnaise shop down the block called Martha’s Mayonnaise, where they charge $8 for mayonnaise; Jay Pharaoh’s character takes a spin class; and the three guys are seen at an art gallery party where a hipster white lady is playing folk song on guitar.
I also saw another skit called “Do the White Thing” that Jimmy Kimmel did to mark the anniversary of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The sketch features a bunch of white actors playing white people living in the now gentrified Brooklyn (Zooey Deschanel, Jay Duplass, Amy Goodman, Rami Malek, Billy Crudup and Jimmy Kimmel play white people in the sketch) and doing things that mark the gentrification of the area, such as Billy Crudup telling Sal (Jimmy Kimmel) he could have at least gotten a gluten free crust in the pizza he ordered, and when Billy Crudup and Rosie Perez are alone together, he reenacts the scene where she is having ice rubbed on her shoulders, and tells her sensually that the ice was handcrafted at this super fancy pump that used bicycle power to pump the water needed for the ice (to top it off, he breaks out a bottle of Sriracha, and that turns her on.)
While at first I thought both of these sketches was hilarious, as I thought more and educated myself more about gentrification and its impact on the longtime, mostly BIPOC residents there, I found a lot less to laugh about. The Last Black Man in San Francisco served as a very timely reminder to me that the widespread gentrification of cities is a very real issue that has hurt a lot of longtime residents, and in particular BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities. While I have never visited San Francisco, the movie allowed me to feel some kinship, some empathy for what the characters were going through. Two young Black men, Jimmie and Montgomery, are navigating the rapidly shifting landscape of their hometown, San Francisco, as its rising rents force many of the longtime residents, Jimmie and Montgomery, out of the city. They travel through the city on skateboard, trying to hang onto old memories, old relics of the past, as their city changes right before their eyes.
While watching this movie, I kept thinking about another A24 film, Moonlight. The Last Black Man in San Francisco wrestles with another theme, the theme of Black masculinity and its varied expressions, and how society’s norms have limited the freedom to show varied expressions of Black masculinity. Moonlight, if you haven’t yet seen it, is about a young gay Black man growing up in Miami, and it features many tender moments as Chiron’s life progresses and he comes into his sexuality and his manhood with the passage of time. There is an intimate moment where him and his crush, Kevin, are sitting on the beach and just talking, and then they fall in love with one another and kiss. Unfortunately, the school bully gets Kevin to beat up Chiron. Even though Kevin shared such an intimate beautiful moment with Chiron in privacy, because society dictates that he must behave a certain way in order for him to be validated as a Black man, he suppresses that vulnerability with himself and with Chiron. As adults, they reunite and share a beautiful tender moment with one another in the privacy of Kevin’s house. Both Kevin and Chiron get to be their authentic selves in this final scene of the film. Even though Jimmie and Montgomery are not explicitly a gay couple, the other Black men who hang around outside their house tease them for being such close friends with one another. They think these men aren’t really men just because they express their friendship with one another in a way that might not fit what their mainstream ideas of male friendship are. But Jimmie and Montgomery share an incredibly beautiful eternal bond that lasts well after the credits. I just felt those tender moments of dialogue, of shared pain and vulnerability with one another about their desire to just own the space they occupy rather than having to constantly leave, their desire to resist the push of change that robs them of their ability to take up space and just live and breathe and reclaim space.
There is one scene in the film that really stuck with me and further illustrates this human vulnerability. When Kofi, one of the guys who hangs out with his crew and goes along with their teasing of Jimmie and Montgomery for acting less masculine than they do, is murdered, the crew is standing outside of Jimmie and Montgomery’s place and they tell them Kofi got shot and killed in a scuffle with another guy. When Jimmie asks why he got killed, one of the guys in the crew approaches him asking why he’s asking so many questions, and Jimmie tells him he doesn’t understand, doesn’t get it because he just saw Kofi and his friends not too long ago. The guy looks at him angrily, and the music builds and I thought he was going to punch Jimmie for what he said, but he ends up breaking down into tears, landing his head on Jimmie’s shoulder and just letting himself feel grief, letting Jimmy share quietly in his grief as well. This scene had me in tears, especially because I haven’t seen many films where Black men are allowed to just be completely vulnerable with one another and just cry, other than this movie and Moonlight. Black men had historically been conditioned by American social conventions to not show pain, to “wear the mask” and mask their pain and hurt with toughness. During the racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, however, I witnessed a collective moment where Black men were allowed to feel pain, to just acknowledge their grief and embrace it. For instance, John Boyega, during a demonstration in the UK, spoke to the crowd about the racism he dealt with as a Black actor and in the middle, after expressing his anger he broke down in tears. It showed me that I need to listen to more narratives, embrace more narratives in which there are many different ways that Black men express their emotions and themselves. Crying is a human emotion, and part of the process of healing in times of grief and trauma is letting myself cry, letting myself feel what I feel, being honest that I am angry, hurt, confused, not knowing what to say and just expressing my complicated inexplicable pain through my tears. This moment where Kofi’s friend cries on Jimmie’s shoulder was just so deep, raw, powerful tender and human all at once, and honestly I might have exhausted my tear ducts from crying so much during that scene.
I also thought it was sad when Jimmie finds out that his granddad didn’t build the house that he and Montgomery bought. In the middle of the film, a group of Segway tourists are on a guided tour, and the white tour guide tells them that the house was built in the early 20th century, but Jimmie calls down to him that he is wrong, that the house was built in 1947 by his grandfather. He tells people this each time he talks to them, but then Montgomery produces a play called The Last Black Man in San Francisco and reveals to Jimmie and the people who attend the play that Jimmie’s grandfather didn’t build the house he bought. Early on Montgomery and Jimmie speak with Clayton, a white real estate agent who just happens to be a lifelong resident of San Francisco like them. But then the real estate agent throws their stuff out and puts the house up for sale, betraying their trust of him. Montgomery meets with him and tells him that Jimmie’s grandfather built the house and that he has no right to throw out their stuff, but Clayton basically tells him he is just doing his job and that the house was actually built by someone else in the 1850s.
Wanda, Jimmie’s auntie, later meets with him, and Jimmie tells her he feels bad because he told everyone his grandfather built it. Wanda tells him that his feelings are normal, and that if he leaves San Francisco, it’s not his loss, it’s San Francisco’s loss. Later on, while on the bus, two young white women, presumably new transplants to the city, talk about how they hate San Francisco, and Jimmie, overhearing their conversation, tells them that they “can’t hate the city unless they love it.” They think he is weird for saying it, but I feel Jimmie on that. If I go to live in a new city, it wouldn’t do anyone or me any favors if I went to a city and expected it to fit my expectations because life doesn’t always fall into place the way I want it to. I have learned that if I want to get the most out of a city, I need to embrace the longtime community and their contributions to the city. Jimmie and Montgomery and the longtime residents share so many memories of San Francisco together, and it’s hard to maintain hope when something you love is fading so fast and so many changes are happening at once. Honestly, it made me think about the US system of slavery, because Black people weren’t allowed to own property because they were property, their bodies belonged to the white slaveowners. They were, under the 3/5 Compromise, not fully human. Gentrification, as shown in the film, robs Jimmie and Montgomery of their right to own space, to take up space and claim it, to mesh their identity with the space they occupy, and so that it constantly feels like no place is home for Jimmie. He asks Montgomery where he’s going to go because he doesn’t know where his mom lives even after a brief encounter with her on the bus, his grandad is in another place so he can’t stay with him, and he can’t stay with his dad. Jimmie is basically homeless, and he has to constantly keep uprooting himself, not being able to settle in one place because the gentrification is raising home prices and making the city much less affordable.
I think what made this film especially incredible was the music and the cinematography. I swear, the aesthetics of the film are phenomenal, the most intimate human imagery. The music is mostly strings and orchestra, with clarinet, oboe and other woodwinds, and its sweeping and soaring nature paired together with Jimmie and Montgomery’s skateboarding through the city, just moved me a lot. Jimmie and Montgomery spend a lot of time in nature. At the beginning they both sit on a grass hilly area overlooking the bay, in peace and quiet while watching a Black man in a suit talk about the environmental injustice of gentrification. Their spending time in nature is significant, particularly in light of last year’s racial profiling of Christian Cooper.
Overall, it was a powerful film that moved me a lot.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco. 2019. Rated R for language, brief nudity and drug use.
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