His feature film debut was the title role in the semi-autobiographical movie The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019).
[1][2] Until he was three years old he lived in a Victorian house that his grandfather, a Baptist preacher,[3] had bought in the predominantly Black middle-class Fillmore district of San Francisco.
[9] Their short film Last Stop Livermore, made in collaboration with Joe's brother Nat, was a finalist in the Golden Gate Awards.
[4] Talbot and Fails conceived of the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco as teenagers,[5][11] and the pair eventually created a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 to fund it.
[11] The film is semi-autobiographical and tells the story of a fictionalized version of Fails, played by the actor, who attempts to reclaim a Victorian home built by his grandfather in a gentrified area of San Francisco.