4.5 stars out of 5
I’m an old-school Spike Lee fan. In high school, my friend Jeff and I drove out by Fort Dix to see She’s Gotta Have It. (“Pleasebabypleasebabypleasebabybabybabyplease.”) I can’t say that I’ve seen all his films since but I have seen several. Chi-Raq was the last one I tried and the first that I couldn’t get through. Was it me? Was it him? Hey, it’s in the past. This is now, and oh man is Lee at full strength with BlackkKlansman.
We begin with a scene of Confederate wounded and dead, then fast-forward a century to “Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard” (a hilarious Alec Baldwin, matching the get-in-get-out brilliance of his Glengarry role) filming a white-supremacy public service announcement, flubs and all. Next it’s the 70s, and we meet Ron Stallworth (a confident John David Washington in his first major movie role), applying for a job on the Colorado Springs police department. Colorado Springs — sounds lush and green and mountainous and mellow and not a hotbed of racial tension. Yet Stallworth notices an active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and decides to infiltrate it by joining. But because he’s black, he’ll need a white detective to complete his undercover Cyrano routine. Enter secular Jew Flip Zimmerman (Kylo Ren).
Pretty high-concept stuff if it wasn’t based on a true story, which makes it all the more wild. There are many laughs here, from Baldwin to Clay Davis from The Wire saying “Sheeeeeeeeeet!” to a drunken comic-relief Klansman. In fact, with the exception of a couple of over-the-top deplorable characters — KKK member Felix (Finnish star Jasper Pääkkönen, totally convincing as American trash) and racist cop Landers (Frederick Weller, also terrific in Mosaic) — everyone has some likable quality. The New York Times got raked over the coals for humanizing white supremacists, but Lee uses that as a scary hook: The kinder, gentler Klan of the 1970s didn’t publicly preach violence, in a cynical effort to weasel its way into the mainstream.
Great casting all around, in big roles and small: Topher Grace as That 70’s Grand Wizard David Duke. Robert John Burke promoted from RoboCop to police chief. Michael Buscemi as a smiling intelligence detective. 24: Not Much of a Legacy star Corey Hawkins as Kwame Ture (the former Stokely Carmichael). Nicholas Turturro, who has played many a police detective, on the other side of the law. Relative newcomer Laura Harrier shines as Black Power student activist (and Stallworth love interest) Patrice Dumas. And a legendary individual who I won’t spoil is featured in one of two smartly directed, Godfather II-esque simultaneous scenes. For Coppola, it was innocence vs. violence; here, Lee contrasts the consecration of hatred with its harrowing after-effects.
The ending is unexpectedly powerful and really knocked me for a loop. If you thought Spike Lee wasn’t going to somehow connect this story to modern America, you don’t know Spike Lee. As a result, he transforms a compelling time piece into an absolutely crucial and urgent movie for today. Ya dig?
Jack Silbert, curator