BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Directed by Spike Lee
Colorado Springs, late 1970s. Ron Stallworth, an African American police officer, and Flip Zimmerman, his Jewish colleague, run an undercover operation to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
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Ron meets the Angela Davis-like Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier) at Ture’s speech and a mischievous Lee portrays their nascent romance like a blaxploitation movie with split screen cutaways of posters for Foxy Brown and Super Fly.
There’s a tribute to the power of Blaxploitation films that’s pretty cool, starting with poster images and ending with the male and female leads taking up Shaft and Foxy Brown poses in a spectacular dolly-zoom shot when they’re confronted with real-life danger.
There are thrills, certainly, but the script (credited to Lee and three other writers) breathes deep breaths, in the same vein as David Fincher’s masterwork, 2007 police procedural “Zodiac.”
Many people are as accepting as they should be, but there’s plenty who would like to see their town as a Black-free zone, even some of the police officers themselves (a pull-over scene reminiscent of 2004’s Crash helps reinforce this further).
It’s not that Lee needs to make his racists endearing or “complex”—this is the impulse that gave us the atrocious scenes of Matt Dillon caring for his sick pop in Crash (2005), after all, and life is full of simple characters—but given the movie he’s set out to make, it would have been edifying to learn what they’re on about beyond received wisdom on wearing bedsheets and burning crosses.
This isn’t the confrontational act of timeline-accordioning open anachronism, à la Derek Jarman, but a politicized version of the lazy art world gags in Midnight in Paris (2011), which seek to flatter an audience for its present-day vantage—instead of inviting self-congratulatory chuckles from viewers who know Luis Buñuel was, it offers the dubious back-pat pleasure that comes from putting very thinly veiled references to Trumpian rhetoric or predictions of the Trump phenomenon in the mouths of Klansmen.
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His first chance to go undercover comes when he’s assigned to wear a wire and report on a Black Student Union event in which Black Panther ex-leader Stokely Carmichael ( Straight Outta Compton ‘s Corey Hawkins), a.k.a.
Dre in “Straight Outta Compton”) owns the screen for his five minutes of blistering “rise up and rebel against racism” speech as Kwame Ture, that former Panther who whips up the college’s black student assembly.
After Kwame Ture ( Straight Outta Compton star Corey Hawkins), born Stokely Carmichael, leaves town after a rousing talk, a slightly more politically attuned Ron stumbles into his next assignment.
When Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins, Straight Outta Compton ) addresses black college students and speaks on police officers gunning down young black men it still rings true.
Ron’s first undercover assignment is to infiltrate a speech promoting Black Power by one of that movement’s founders, Stokely Carmichael ( Straight Outta Compton ‘s Corey Hawkins), who had changed his name to Kwame Ture a decade earlier.
But! BlacKkKlansman keeps getting called spot-on, and (as Quentin Tarantino showed in Django Unchained ) the moronic nature of the Klan and its beliefs makes it an excellent target for comedy.
The dialogue is jarring; not since "Django Unchained" have this many ugly and jarring racial epithets been uttered on screen.
Lee was an outspoken critic of Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” slamming the director’s excessive use of the N-word (which features about four dozen times here), and his movie feels like a different kind of anti-racism revenge saga — one that is plenty stylized but based in reality and could reasonably be considered a positive example.
Also noteworthy is that during the more humorous scenes, Lee never steps outside the real-world situationin which BlacKkKlansman lives, unlike filmmaker Quentin Tarantino does with his hilarious KKK scenes in 2012’s Django Unchained.
As his erstwhile sparring partner Quentin Tarantino did in Django Unchained , Lee portrays the KKK as a bunch of dummies and exaggerates their stupidity, with the exception of local leader Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold).
It is, on some level, as much a response to this particular moment in history as, say, Steven Spielberg’s The Post , another movie that was pilloried in some corners for being too obvious in its anti-Trump messaging.