This is going to be a poor review for a few reasons. 1) The movie is so dense I'd need at least another viewing to appropriately comment on everything in it, 2) which would take a whole book to do, and 3) it's such an amazing cultural object that you could spend hours considering it from all kinds of angles. That's Spike Lee for you, and this may be one of my favorites yet from him.
BlacKkKlansman follows the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), the first black detective in Colorado Springs. Despite mistreatment from his coworkers and bosses, he perseveres and goes undercover. Unfortunately, his undercover test-run is to a black student union rally, where he meets the organization's president as well as a national civil rights leader, Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins). Having succeeded in his task, Stallworth officially joins the intelligence office and is partnered with, among other men, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). Almost immediately, Stallworth sees a newspaper ad for the Ku Klux Klan and places a call.
It's a whirlwind of humor and horror as Stallworth joins the Klan and climbs their ranks purely through phone calls. When in-person meetings become mandatory, Stallworth sends the Jewish Zimmerman to impersonate him and solidify his membership. When David Duke (Topher Grace) becomes a staple in Stallworth's regular phone conversations, the detective hopes to gain insight into the Klan's activities and prevent any violence. But then Duke comes to Colorado Springs, the real Stallworth is assigned as his bodyguard, and the climax is essentially a clusterfuck of mixed signals and switched identities and racist violence.
Amazing as this story is, in the hands of Spike Lee it becomes a multitude of other -- larger and more important -- things as well. Lee imbues the tale with laugh-out-loud humor, deeply uncomfortable social commentary, and the most disturbing racial psychology since Get Out. The movie squarely belongs to John David Washington, whose command of the screen and script have no parallel. I don't know him from any other film, but his performance here is arresting and challenging. Topher Grace steals his scenes as the [insert adjective here] David Duke, and all his Klan brothers (and sisters!) follow suit, whether they be totally batshit crazy or so cool, calm, and collected that they could be your beloved neighbor. Though I usually don't find his performances convincing or compelling, here Adam Driver carries his weight admirably and balances moments of potential overacting (in some really difficult scenes, no less) with some incredible nuance and subtle humor.
Want more significance? Lee makes this movie a culturally reflexive film about film, about representation, and about the state of racism in America now. While the main plot of the film is set in the '70s, the film opens with Gone with the Wind (1939) imagery of the aftermath of a battlefield, followed immediately by a white supremacist infomercial narrated by a rather terrifying Alec Baldwin. Though he fumbles his words and works hard to get the message right, his speech is intercut with images of racism and violence, but undercut with hyperstylized imagery that makes us unsure of whether we should laugh or cringe or leave. But racism is not something so antiquated and obvious, as Lee is determined to show us.
The end of the film, like its beginning, features another blast from the past, when the KKK initiation includes a screening of The Birth of a Nation (1915), and we are forced to see scenes as a part of Lee's movie, not just framed as Griffith's dated picture. Not long after this sequence and Lee's film's climax, the denouement of the film leaps forward a few decades by showing footage from the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. We see the march, the protests, the counter-protests, the car attack, and even Trump's statements about evil being on "many sides" of the issue.
Though Lee can feel a little preachy in his films, by the end of BlacKkKlansman I wanted even more. For Lee, though this film is an absolute assault on contemporary issues, this film is also unusually indirect. He has created Art where he could have simply vomited rhetoric and style and morality on an age where Nazis are again openly marching in the streets. He has mined history and polished it, presenting it as truth and as allegory, framed it with art history in the form of film, and at the same time made an endlessly entertaining feature. It's amazing.
And then he released the film one year to the day after that Charlottesville rally. He's a damn genius.
Go see this movie. Go see it again. Take a friend. Take two. Tell everyone about it. Then buy it when it comes out. Host screenings. Circulate it amongst friends. It's that great.
And don't forget -- Nazis deserve to be punched.
IMDb: BlacKkKlansman
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