David Lee / Focus Features
Adam Driver stars as Flip Zimmerman and John David Washington as Ron Stallworth inSpike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, a Focus Features release.
Spike Lee’s still got it. BlacKkKlansman is the sixty-one-year-old writer-director’s best—and most radical—feature since Do the Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1992). It may also be Lee’s funniest film since his 1986 sex farce She’s Gotta Have It (Lee has since co-adapted the comedy about triple-timing Nola Darling for a Netflix series).
The premise of the newest Spike Lee “Joint” is certainly not immediately humorous. As BlacKkKlansman’s title suggests, an African American infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan, a plot that falls under the category of “stranger than fiction.” During the 1970s, Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington) became the Colorado Springs Police Department’s first black detective. Eager to prove himself to his Caucasian colleagues, Ron goes undercover to monitor the white supremacist organization.
Ron, who sports an afro, doesn’t use the “whiteface” makeup popularized in films like Melvin Van Peebles’ 1970 satire Watermelon Man, but rather penetrates the KKK with the assistance of white detective Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver of HBO’s Girls and Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise). Flip himself is a lapsed Jew, who rediscovers his identity even as he fraternizes with the overtly anti-Semitic, racist Klan.
Ron manages to forge a relationship with the KKK’s then-Grand Wizard, David Duke (deftly played by an almost unidentifiable Topher Grace, co-star of the popular Wisconsin-set TV series That ’70s Show). Ron’s interactions with Duke are integral to BlacKkKlansman’s plot, and also provide the movie with comic highlights.
Another key figure is Stokely Carmichael (Corey Hawkins, who played Dr. Dre in 2015’s Straight Outta Compton), the former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman who introduced the slogan “Black Power” to the public discourse.
After moving to Guinea, Stokely had changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor African independence leaders. The former Black Panther is back in America for a speaking tour and has been brought to a Colorado campus by the Black Student Union, led by Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier, co-star of Spider-Man: Homecoming), who sports the screen’s best afro since Vonetta McGee played Angela Davis 40 years ago in Brothers.
David Lee / Focus Features
Laura Harrier stars as Patrice and John David Washington as Ron Stallworth in Spike Lee’sBlacKkKlansman, a Focus Features release.
Ron contrives to meet the leather-clad Patrice at Stokely’s speech. In a film about hidden identities, complications ensue. Ron may indeed be secretly working for “the man,” but he and Flip thwart cross burnings, and in the denouement confront a terrorist scheme straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 Secret Agent.
The top-notch cast includes Alec Baldwin, who opens BlacKkKlansman as Beauregard, a Dixiecrat Confederate propaganda-spewing narrator. Legendary ninety-one-year-old activist, actor, and singer Harry Belafonte appears as Jerome Turner, recounting a lynching he witnessed to a rapt African American audience.
Lee weaves in clips from racist Hollywood blockbusters like D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), emphasizing the role of movies in public perception of race and how, as Lee notes in his 2000 satire Bamboozled, celluloid stereotypes are extremely harmful.
Lee emphasizes the role of movies in public perception of race and the harm caused by celluloid stereotypes.
While much of BlacKkKlansman is told in a straightforward narrative, ever the NYU film school grad, Lee has filmic flourishes, and the dialogue, based on Stallworth’s book, has references to Blaxploitation flicks that will delight cinephiles. The soundtrack includes an original score by Terence Blanchard, as well as rollicking period hits by the Staple Sisters, Bill Withers, and others.
Griffith’s silent film homage to the KKK features a shattering cinematic grand finale, with hooded Klansmen on horseback racing to the rescue of blonde Lillian Gish’s “virtue.” Concluding events in BlacKkKlansman similarly build toward a final cross burning attempt that will have viewers at the edge of their seats. The would-be victims defend themselves in a stylized tableau reminiscent of Emory Douglas’ illustrations for the Black Panther Party newspaper.
Spike Lee is primarily known as a feature filmmaker, but he’s also a gifted documentarian, having directed 4 Little Girls about the 1963 bombing at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church (1997), and When the Levees Broke about Hurricane Katrina (2006). In its last sequence, BlacKkKlansman erupts with news footage of Charlottesville’s neo-Nazi racist rampages that feel especially jarring as larger-than-life images. We see the real David Duke endorsing Donald Trump and then the President himself commenting on “the fine people” in Charlottesville. BlacKkKlansman premieres just as America observes the one year anniversary of the Charlottesville debacle.
In BlacKkKlansman, Lee explores the historic Black-Jewish Alliance through Ron’s partnership with Flip. He also looks at alleged KKK-U.S. Army connections, police abuse of power, Black Power, and the FBI. Lee ponders, can a black person enter the police force and effectuate new policies? Can one change the system from within? The film closes with Malcolm X’s quote: “By any means necessary.”
In 2015, Spike Lee won an Honorary Oscar, but he has only been nominated twice for any of his films per se. This time around the Motion Picture Academy will have a hard time overlooking Lee’s extremely enjoyable, masterful BlacKkKlansman, because after this movie, Spike’s gotta have it.
BlacKkKlansman opens August 10.
The third edition of “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book” is co-authored by L.A.-based film historian/reviewer Ed Rampell. On Aug. 26 Rampell is co-presenting a live stage tribute to Rev. King and the 55th Anniversary of the March on Washington: https://www.gofundme.com/dr-king-commemoration.