The Last Black Man in San Francisco review – moving tale of racial gentrification

“You don’t get to hate it unless you love it,” says third-generation San Franciscan Jimmie (Jimmie Fails). He’s on a bus, quietly incensed as a pair of yuppies (one played by Thora Birch) declare that the city is over. This Sundance award-winning film, written and directed by Joe Talbot and based on his friend Fails’s real-life experiences, uses one hand to present a middle finger to the gentrification adversely affecting black San Franciscans, and the other to embrace the city’s now-displaced artists, oddballs and crumbling architecture.

Related: 'There's still hope' – behind gentrification drama The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Which is not to say this is a message film; it’s more an archive of the fast-changing metropolis, as documented by two dreamers deeply protective of, and romantic about, their hometown. The plot centres on a regal Victorian house in San Francisco’s historic Fillmore district, supposedly built by Jimmie’s grandfather in 1946. When the house is vacated by its white, middle-class tenants, Jimmie becomes king of his empty castle, at home among its stained-glass windows, dusty library and abandoned games room. It’s a welcome change from the mattress he sleeps on in his friend Montgomery’s (Jonathan Majors) cramped bedroom in Hunters Point, a low-income neighbourhood built on toxic waste.

Talbot’s film is not perfect. A scene set to Joni Mitchell’s Blue makes its point awkwardly, and the narrative, like its characters, is prone to meandering. Yet as a film about place and personal mythology, it’s hugely moving. A crew of local African American men function as the story’s charged Greek chorus; Emile Mosseri’s sweeping and optimistic woodwind score similarly emphasises the film’s fable-like quality. Eccentric details, such as a mutated fish with four, gawping eyes, or a shot of the princely Jimmie looking out over a hilly street in a pair of pale pink nurse’s scrubs, pleasingly bring to mind the films of Wes Anderson.