Thursday, June 6, 2019

Inside This Summer’s Gentrification-Focused Indie Sensation

A wave of films about gentrification in the San Francisco Bay Area have been released over the past year, including Sorry to Bother You and Blindspotting. But none of these projects has been quite as gripping or personal as The Last Black Man in San Francisco, which generated a tidal wave of praise at Sundance—and now hits theaters Friday under the tony banners of A24 and Plan B. The film is about Jimmie Fails, a character played by and based on Fails himself—a young black man in the titular city who grew up with his father (played in the film by Rob Morgan, a tour de force) in a beautiful Victorian home built, according to family lore, by Fails’s grandfather, also named Jimmie. When the neighborhood got too expensive, the real Jimmie and his father were displaced, beginning what is rendered in the movie as a surreal odyssey. Yohana Desta spoke to Fails and director Joe Talbot, who also happens to be Fails’s close childhood friend, about their road to the big screen, and why Talbot was the right partner to tell this story—even though he’s white himself. “A lot of people have a misconception of Joe trying to tell a black story, but that’s not what it is,” Fails told Desta. “He’s telling his friend’s story, and I just happen to be black.”

Elsewhere in HWD, we parse the few details available about Woody Allen’s next movie—though nobody involved seems to want to speak about it on the record; TV’s hottest actors celebrate being on hiatus by frolicking in the sun for photographer Holly Andres; Laura Bradleyasks Bradley Whitford to get to the bottom of his mysterious Handmaid’s Tale season three character, Commander Lawrence; and Josh Duboff takes us inside the Big Little Lies season two premiere party in the latest episode of our In the Limelight podcast.