The first of Barry Jenkins's features and the last for me to get to. It's closer to If Beale Street Could Talk than Moonlight in being more about romance and locality and less about character development and milieu. Here she’s on a relationship holiday and the he’s just been dumped in a desaturated San Francisco circa 2008. MySpace was a thing, as were fixies and indie. There's some railing against the racial hierarchy (from him) and on the decline of the city due to the 2000 tech boom (from some randoms in a shopfront, very late to that party). And didn't things get so much better! Apparently girls just want to have fun for the most part, when they're not making banal t-shirts.
Overall humdrum. It's a bit Hal Hartley — highly stylized, arch dialogue, set pieces, conceptual — but without the kook or recurring ensemble or point. (Does Jenkins ever work with the same actors twice?) The Sunday night in an SF nightclub was uninspired; it's no Small Axe. The structure is essentially the "organ first, relationship later" of Cooley in Don's Party (from Australia in 1976!), spun to feature-length with swapped genders. Vanilla Ice v Queen and David Bowie? Come on.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Perhaps the interracial dating thing got him thinking. A critic's pick by A. O. Scott, who drew a comparison with Spike Lee (!). Mumblecore! And yes, the one-day structure is super common, e.g. Before Sunrise. The soundtrack is intriguing. I see Jenkins is attached to a fourth bout of True Detective.