This is the second movie I’ve seen this year where part of the plot is driven by a black mans’ ability to impersonate a white man over the phone.
Of course, BlacKkKlansman is not as bizarre or unique as Sorry to Bother You, but it still sounds like a crazy idea. That a black cop could infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan, gain insight into their organization, and circumvent their operations. But it did happen. And it’s a fascinating story to tell, made all the more interesting when Spike Lee is the one telling it, complete with his sense of humour, raw passion, and unfiltered racial commentary. BlacKkKlansman is not a movie to be missed.
Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) joins the Colorado Springs Police Department in 1979, and after a successful undercover operation into a Black Panther rally, phones the local chapter of the KKK to join. Recruiting a co-worker Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to be the white Ron Stallworth, he spearheads an undercover investigation into the organization, going as high into its ranks as Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace) himself. At the same time he begins a relationship with a Black Panther radical Patrice (Laura Harrier) who’s unaware of his true occupation.
The movie opens almost farcically with footage from Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation, the latter of which is returned to with venom later in the film, as Alec Baldwin plays a white supremacist shooting a recruitment video as he makes mistakes and stumbles over his lines. Thematically it’s meant to ridicule the Klan, but it also sets up the tone of the film, in which hatred isn’t taken insincerely, but the espousers of it aren’t given dignity. Most of the humour of the film comes at the expense of bigots. Yet in doing that the movie doesn’t forget how unhinged and dangerous these racists are.
The humour offsets the tension, which there’s a lot of in this movie. One Klansman (Jasper Paakkonen) is pretty suspicious of “Ron” and comes close to discovering the truth in a number of moments. Lee really knows how to pace his scenes and emphasize the danger, while the actors are terrific in these confrontations, particularly Adam Driver who has to be in the lions’ den a lot. This is the rare Spike Lee film that actually portrays cops in a halfway decent light, by which I mean half are decent, while a few are still prejudiced and abusive. Zimmerman is very likeable though, a consummate professional, both cool and cool-headed in various moments. Stallworth is too of course, with John David Washington really giving an impressive performance that builds in confidence over the course of the movie. Paakkonen is terrifying and Grace likewise does a good job bringing to life the false respectability and ambitions of one of the most hateful politicians America has seen.
An adversary of Duke also appears in this movie: Kwame Ture, played by Corey Hawkins. Ture’s speech to an audience of black college students is powerfully delivered, punctuated with images of student faces reacting to his message of black power. Spike Lee has always been very political, and there are clearly two purposes to his intent with this film: to tell the extraordinary story of a black man infiltrating the KKK, and to showcase the Klan’s contemporary relevancy, including just how alive and well white supremacy still is in America. There’s a lot of familiar rhetoric at the Klan gatherings: chants of “America First”, talk of restoring greatness to America, and then there’s the publicly acceptable guise of David Duke -hiding hate speech through a calm demeanour and articulate language, and claiming white victimhood. At one point, being informed of Duke’s political aspirations, Stallworth scoffs at the idea of him one day being President. All this sounds very on-the-nose and it is to an extent, but Lee is nothing if not pointed.
A KKK event is juxtaposed with a Black Panther meeting; specifically the Klan members watch, jeer at, and enjoy Birth of a Nation while the Panthers listen to Harry Belafonte relate how that very film inspired the white people of his town to brutally murder his friend, making a point too to note that Birth of a Nation was praised by Woodrow Wilson and screened at the White House. And that’s another interesting thing Lee is doing with this film: criticizing the representation of race in media and its impact in the real world. Stallworth and Patrice even have this discussion, regarding Shaft and Super Fly, with Patrice citing the latters’ subject matter as detrimental to the cause. Duke references an affinity for Hattie McDaniel’s character in Gone with the Wind to prove he doesn’t hate black people -some he believes can be likened to faithful pets. Lee is making a statement on how we perceive white supremacy, how culture fosters that perception, how it can be clothed in a façade of reason and diplomacy, and how it can insidiously infiltrate society just as Stallworth infiltrated the Klan; and nothing proves his point more than the specific way he ends BlacKkKlansman.
The great tragedy of Spike Lee’s brilliant Do the Right Thing is that it’s still relevant today, nearly thirty years after it came out. With BlacKkKlansman, which is set forty years ago, he knows it is too, and works that commentary into the film itself. The film is still telling a very interesting story about a man who did something unbelievable, it manages to be funny and suspenseful; but the importance of what it’s communicating right now is something else entirely.
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