This film opens with the words “based on a true story” splashed across the screen. About 70-odd minutes later, just before the closing credits roll, we’re also told that “all characters and events in this film, even those based on real individuals, are completely fictional”. Somewhere between those two contradictory, lawyer-friendly statements, a print-the-legend account unfolds of a semi-heroic individual who was indeed named Charlie Walker.
A Black man born in the south who relocated to the Bay area of northern California to raise a family, this film’s version of Charlie Walker (Mike Colter) is first encountered in 1971 trying to build up a trucking business in San Francisco. Charlie faces endemic racism that prevents him getting ahead in the haulage business to provide for his family, which includes his wife (and the film’s narrator) Ann (Safiya Fredericks) and three young girls.
But an environmental tragedy, an oil spill caused by the collision of two tankers, offers Charlie an opportunity when he wins a contract to clean up Stinson Beach in Marin County, on the northern side of the Golden Gate Bridge, using specialised heavy plant and help from volunteer “hippies”. All that is mostly true, with the oil company whose tankers crashed here named Tower, and is mostly represented by sleazy, entitled bossman Bennett (Dylan Baker), who with his associates stands in for all the bigoted white capitalists who thwarted Charlie along the way.
It’s refreshing to see a film set in this period where the Black male lead is neither a gangster nor a cop or a soldier, but a wily small businessman struggling to get ahead; Charlie is the sort of character who could have stepped off the teleprompter from Kamala Harris’s basic stump speech. Not averse to bending rules and cutting corners, he is no paragon of virtue and it’s clear he doesn’t really care much about oil-logged seabirds. He is delighted when he finds a connection to a road builder with a government contract so that he can offload the oil-laden sand he’s scraping off the beach and sell it on for profit, even though the oil technically belongs to someone else.
Colter gets across Charlie’s perspicacity, and his drive, and you can see why the real man became friends with then upcoming politician Willie Brown (who plays a cab driver in the film); the latter would go on to become mayor of San Francisco, and for a time Harris’s romantic partner. The whole thing plays like a story from the pen of David Simon (creator of The Wire) with a tiny smidge of Blaxploitation cool.
• I’m Charlie Walker is on digital platforms from 11 November.
