The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) on Netflix
Jimmie Fails sleeps on the floor of his best friend Montgomery Allen's bedroom. He wants back the Victorian house in the Fillmore District his grandfather built, now home to an older couple.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb7.2/1023,255 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jimmie Fails IV is a third generation San Franciscan who came back to the city three years ago. He sleeps on the floor in the cramped bedroom of his best friend Montgomery Allen, who lives with his blind grandfather and writes a play between shifts at a supermarket fish counter. Jimmie earns little nursing at a seniors' care facility, and the family he rarely sees is scattered: his father in an SRO, his mother and her husband in Los Angeles, his aunt Wanda out in the suburbs. The house he wants back is in the Fillmore District, built in 1946 by his grandfather, who chose an empty lot rather than one of the homes made available when Japanese Americans were interned. A white couple lives there now.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jamal Trulove, cast on the spot as Jimmie's friend Kofi, had been falsely charged with murdering his friend in 2007 and acquitted at a 2015 retrial; the San Francisco Board of Supervisors later approved a $13.1 million settlement to him for being framed by police.
- Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails shot a preview trailer in May 2015 and launched a Kickstarter that beat its $50,000 goal by more than $25,000, with 1,500 contributors giving just over $75,000 inside a month and making Fails, the campaign's face, a local San Francisco figure.
- Joe Talbot, introduced to Ghost World at 15, was heavily influenced by that 2001 film and, as an homage, asked its star Thora Birch to cameo, drawing a link between her character Enid and Jimmie.
- With no film training and no industry contacts, Joe Talbot took his first advice on how to start from a cold email to Barry Jenkins, who had shot Medicine for Melancholy in San Francisco before making Moonlight.
