The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019, Joe Talbot) (Patreon)

60/100

Formal timidity is my primary complaint about Sundance indies, but the flip side of that is stylization that's aggressive bordering on obnoxious. Talbot really goes nuts at the outset, to a degree that risks burying Last Black Man's heartfelt qualities; it often feels as if Jimmie and Mont are in competition with a renegade demo reel, especially during the needlessly "bravura" skateboard sequences. (There's no very good reason why the film doesn't just begin with Jimmie at work painting the house. How he gets there isn't relevant, so the ostensible dynamism comes across as empty showboating.) At the same time, though, I can't help but feel affectionate toward a movie that suffers primarily from a surfeit of ambition. It's entirely appropriate (albeit kinda cheesy) that the dramatic climax occurs in the middle of a makeshift theater production, since "Let's put on a show!" permeates nearly every scene. Sometimes that ethos surfaces in dopey ways, e.g. the casual nudist at the bus stop ("This city," he ironically sighs) or Mont talking to Kofi and his crew as if they're characters he's imagined rather than people he's observing. But I eventually found myself warming to random flourishes, much as I grew to appreciate Spike Lee's bizarro PeopleMover shot as he kept deploying it in film after film. (Lee's clearly a major influence here, for better and worse.) And while Talbot never stops trying a bit too hard, Fails' forthright self-impersonation intermittently cuts through the whimsy, as when Jimmie struggles to maintain his stoicism while Kofi more or less acts out Molly Ringwald's brutally honest answer to Anthony Michael Hall's question about how she'll treat him at school come Monday. Of the three 2019 Sundance films I initially bailed on (all of which struck me as overly autobiographical/reality-based; others were The Souvenir and The Farewell), this is the one I'm most glad that my arcane personal rules forced me to go back and watch from start to finish.