- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 March 2008 14.54 GMT
I was drawn to this film by an astounding statistic: San Francisco has the lowest proportion of African-American residents of any major US city. Unfortunately, that proved to be the most interesting thing about this movie. In order to demonstrate how the former epicentre of the American counterculture has turned into an ethnically cleansed yuppietopia, first time film-maker Barry Jenkins turned to Ray Bradbury's short story collection of the title, in which he advises, "find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day".
So, the action begins with two young African-Americans who wake up in bed together the morning after a party. It becomes clear they don't even know each other's names, but they wind up spending the day together in the city, gradually turning a one-night stand into something deeper. He's polite, laid-back and politically conscious. She's stylish, self-assured and initially aloof. Both of them cycle. And both of them have subscribed to San Francisco's eco-yuppie lifestyle to some degree, at the expense of their minority roots (they both have white partners, it emerges).
Sounds promising, right? But the film suffers from a general lack of imagination. The leads are likeable, but their conversations rarely rise above the commonplace, and as they wander the more picturesque public areas of the city, the political points are clumsily shoehorned into their blossoming relationship. My heart sank when they decided to visit the Museum of the African Diaspora, where the camera literally reads the literature on the walls and listens to the recorded speeches, taking in the displays in mute fascination like a tourist. Throughout, there's a tendency to tell, rather than show, and it all starts to feel like a sociology lesson. When the couple happen to wander past a community centre and hear a discussion on the lack of rent-controlled apartments going on - an unbelievably concise and erudite discussion at that - I decided I'd had enough and sidled to the exit.
