Michael Roemer, 95, is one of film’s finest chroniclers of postwar American aspiration. His debut, Nothing But a Man, won two prizes at the Venice film festival over half a century ago, using Euro-neorealism to tell the story of a working-class Black couple in Alabama. The result is a moving and unflinching depiction of the daily realities of racism, and one of the most brilliant truly independent films of all time. Nothing But a Man, like the rest of Roemer’s filmography, refused to heed the production and aesthetic conventions of its day. “If I could have made popular films, I...