A most promising film debut for director Talbot: The Last Black Man in SF

 The Joe Talbot debut feature, The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), has many great elements and moments, a film that's hard not to like even if many of the plot elements clearly preposterous and sometimes hard to follow. But no matter - you could say the film was worth watching for one of its laugh-out-loud moments alone (the bus stop scene in the Castro neighborhood; I'll give away no more). The plot involves two black men, best buddies, one of whom, Jimmie, has taken it on as his life's mission to buy and restore the beautiful Queen Anne-style mansion in which his family had lived for generations,  in the Fillmore district, once a black neighborhood now becoming gentrified. The efforts of the two men to take over possession of the house - getting rid of current tenants, entering as squatters, going through hoops to get ownership in their name - while highly unlikely do give us a picture of the pangs of gentrification, the struggle for good housing in a ridiculously over-priced environment - and along the way we see many SF neighborhoods seldom seen by visitors or even denizens, we see the struggles of the families of these two young men (Jimmie's family difficult and estranged; his friend (Mont)'s family loving and attentive (especially nice are the scenes w/ Mont's father who is blind) and we get a bit of social commentary on real-estate and banking scams and the housing market that makes some rich and others homeless. Jimmie and Mont also have some run-ins w/ a small group of neighborhood toughs - and much of the plot involves the efforts of Mont, an aspiring playwright, to create and stage a pop-up production centered on the history of the house that the two guys are rehabbing. In short, the film have a lot going for it, and you have to love it for its earnestness - a most-promising debut for co-writer and director Talbot.