BlackKklansman

In 1992 when JFK was released, Spike Lee presented Malcolm X, and Lee and Oliver Stone, the firebrand director of JFK had a sporting rivalry over two political biopics. What those two films have in common is a spectacular visual flourish which is not often seen these days in cinemas: a visual style that can be unfussy but can also soar to remarkable visual statements which make films worth going to see. Neither director gets entirely credited for being experts at their craft because of the politics, but both have made films which set hell-raising aside. In the case of Spike Lee, Inside Man is really the only kind of heist movie that should be made.

BlacKkKlansman has that sort of ‘thriller-movie’ tension, but it is—as the title card says—“based on some fo’ real fo’ real sh-t”. It’s the story of how a black Colorado Springs cop infiltrates the white supremacist terrorist organisation the Ku Klux Klan. Spike Lee doesn’t have any punches to pull throughout the entire film. The film begins with the head of the KKK, Dr Kennebrew Beauregard (Alec Baldwin!!!) rehearsing some repugnant racist speech. This before we get to Ron Stalworth (John David Washington, a young policeman being interviewed for a position on the Colorado Springs PD. He gets in, and during the course of the story goes undercover and becomes involved with a Black Power activist Patrice (Laura Harrier). Stalworth manages to move the police’s attention away from Black Power when he calls up the KKK and asks to join. Amazingly, he is allowed to and in order to make it work, he and his colleague Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver!!!) both play the part of ‘Stalworth’—so only Driver’s character meets the Klan.

And so the two rival organisations are contrasted as David Duke (Topher Grace) is about to visit Colorado Springs. The Black Power movement obviously plan to protest it, and the Klan plan to blow up a meeting of Black Power. And as all this is happening, Zimmerman is at a Klan ceremony, about to be inducted into the KKK… The induction scene plays in counterpoint with black activists listening to an account of a lynching from a first-hand memory of the event, all the while the tension is rising because, in an absurdly comical twist of fate, Stalworth is the cop they’ve got to look after the safety of David Duke.

Aside from this clashing of two furious groups of people, the relationship between Stalworth and Patrice represents two different points of view in how to deal with the race issue. Stalworth believes in becoming a cop and trying to fix things from the inside but Patrice can’t accept that, as she wants to destroy a society that’s structurally racist. This is remarkably current thinking even though the story is set in the seventies. In a break from politics the two discuss Pam Greer films as they walk across a bridge, and Spike Lee fills his screen with the movie posters as they’re mentioned. It’s a scene that seems to be a rest from a visual onslaught, but with Spike Lee there is no rest. And I praise him for that.

This is a brilliant and profound piece of cinema that’s also difficult to watch. The KKK are given a voice which is doubtless the voice of Spike Lee and his co-writers. I wouldn’t be surprised if they all gathered together to watch Birth of A Nation and treat it like an audience participation movie. The feeling it leaves you with is one of despair because there’s nothing that can be done about a history that goes back to a bad DW Griffiths black and white film and pushes forward to race riots in America last year, and David Duke himself (in inserted news footage) talking about “taking America Back”. 

The film has its triumphant moments of small attacks on racism, and some of these are funny—but most of the laughs are a shock reaction to unbelievably horrible ideas spoken by unspeakable people. The relentlessness of the film is enough to wear you down if you’re not prepared for it. The little victories seem to be all we have and Spike Lee’s final visual is one that suggests a country in distress. If bad things are coming to that country then we will be able to identify this film as one of the cultural events that sounded the alarm. But it is a wonderful film, a technical marvel and one of Spike Lee’s best.