There’s a loaded line that Spike Lee has to navigate with BlacKkKlansman. The line is between entertaining the audience while being faithful to the crazy but true story of Ron Stallworth and making a credible and incendiary link between the bigotry and systematic oppression that has always existed and our current wretched circumstances in this country. For the most part he is successful.
The stranger than fiction story from the 1970s is about a rookie cop Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) in Colorado Springs, who pretended to be white on a lark and called the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. He was so believable as a racist white man on the phone, that he convinced his superiors to let him lead a broader investigation to infiltrate the Klan. He was helped by his Jewish partner Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) who “played” him when meeting with the Klan...
Simultaneously Stallworth starts a relationship with a militant college student leader, Patrice (Laura Harrier) who doesn’t mince words when disparaging the racism and brutality of the police.
The set-up is so preposterous that the film can’t help but be funny. We follow Stallworth as he forges a phone friendship with David Duke (Topher Grace) while Flip is trying to gain trust and rise in the ranks of the local Klan chapter. It’s not easy to mock the bigoted Klan members and to present them as dangerous at the same time. Yet it’s done well here and sometimes within the same scene. Maintaining a hilarious yet sober tone while juggling all these threads is where Lee proves to be at his sharpest. He takes even more audacious risks, too. At one point he stops the narrative to introduce Harry Belafonte telling us the harrowingly detailed story of the lynching of Jesse Washington, the black mentally challenged teenager who was accused of raping a white woman in Texas in 1916. Lee and his faithful editor Barry Alexander Brown intercut that with the Klan watching and cheering The Birth of A Nation, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film that heralded the reinvigoration of the Klan. Ballsy indeed, yet Lee pulls it off.
Washington grounds the absurdity of his character’s actions with charisma and credibility even if the character is straightforwardly drawn. Ron and Patrice discuss all the big issues that the movie is concerned with and take opposing sides, such as with police oppression and brutality: the police can be the enemy to black people in this country, so do we need to fight this system of oppression from inside? Since Stallworth is a cop and Patrice is a militant student union leader you can pretty much guess which sides they take. The discussions are balanced, natural, and flow easily but at the same time they limit the characters from getting into deeper more personal arcs. Driver has a more conflicted arc to play as Zimmerman is forced to reckon with passing as a white non-Jewish man who’s afforded the privilege of ignoring the racism of the klan (though I wish this had been explored more).
There’s a scene where Ron and Patrice dance in a club that particularly lifted me. Showing people of color singing, dancing, falling in love, having a good time, just living is a balm badly needed. Especially at a time when as people of color we are constantly being attacked in the news and the images we see in the media are often of death, incarceration and suffering. That Lee links that moment of levity and the many other moments of hilarity directly to our generally anxious current existence is his masterstroke.
Are the parallels of this story to current affairs sometimes presented too on the nose? Sure, but that also makes them more resonant. Sometimes things need to be clear and not clouded in half-telegraphed metaphors. This is why this film is going to be popular and start many conversations.
Grade: B+