‘Black KkKlansman’ is Spike Lee’s Masterpiece

When Spike Lee says no one makes movies like he does, he is right. Messy, raw, audacious, didactic, his films always have something important to say, even if he often gets lost in the saying. Not so with “BlacKkKlansman,” Lee’s most important, and best, film in over a decade.

Opening sequences are one of Lee’s trademark talents, the cinematic overtures that set up the stories that will follow; “BlacKkKlansman” is no different. The first image we see is the famous crane shot of Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara making her way through the carnage left after a Civil War battle. The camera then pulls up and back to show the vast field of death and dying Confederate soldiers. It is an iconic moment in film history; but then Lee suddenly uses it to launch a horrifying tutorial on the history of racism in America.

First we see artifacts from the past showing our national obsession with white identity politics, racial terrorism and paranoia. Alec Baldwin, with slicked-back hair and spectacles, delivers a peroration on the dangers of miscegenation and a resulting mongrel nation that might have been given in Charlottesville last year. It sounds utterly of today.

At its core, “BlacKkKlansman” is about Ron Stallworth, who in the 1970s became the first African American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department. Through a series of bizarre accidents and mistaken identities he managed to infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and the movie is loosely based on the book he wrote about his experience. The movie Stallworth (a terrific John David Washington, Denzel’s son) is styled like a Blaxploitation hero: His magnificent Afro is perfectly picked out, smooth around his head like the turban of an Iranian cleric; his aura of cool is unruffled, impenetrable; there is a softness to how he is photographed. 

The film’s narrative is more uneven than its visual design. At a Stokely Carmichael rally — which Lee films in soft backlighting that gives the closeups of audience members, especially a tableau of young women, an ethereal glow — Stallworth meets an attractive Colorado College student leader (Laura Harrier), with whom he begins a quasi-romantic debate that centers on one of Lee’s favorite questions: Is it better to fight for change from within or from outside the system? Later, when Stallworth happens on a recruitment ad for the local KKK, he begins a cat-and-mouse game with the Klan leader in a series of telephone calls then persuades his white police buddy, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver, in a droll, smarter-than-the-Klansmen-around-him performance) to impersonate him in real life.

“BlacKkKlansman” then becomes a police procedural, alternately tense and funny — the Klansmen (and one sad Klan wife who so wants to be one of the boys) are astonishingly dumb — with “Mod Squad” overtones. This tonal difference is difficult to balance with Lee’s penchant for blunt, in-your-face speeches and right-on, trenchant comparisons to today’s toxic environment. (Yes, Trump gets mentioned.) Stallworth’s telephone friendship with national Klan leader David Duke (Topher Grace, menacing in his matter-of-fact blandness) might have been scripted by machine; the same is true of Duke’s speech later in the film.

As the plot thickens and Stallworth and Zimmerman discover the Klan’s violent intentions, the movie becomes less credible. The final scene is so clumsy that there is little tension. But clunky and messy though it often is, “BlacKkKlansman” is enormously entertaining, even prescient. In an extended, touching and graceful coda, Harry Belafonte as a civil rights veteran gives a powerful reminiscence of a lynching while, on the split screen, we see the Klan chapter watching a screening of “The Birth of a Nation.”  Then come shots, (Lee says many not seen before by the public,) from the white supremacists’ rally in Charlottesville almost exactly a year ago. We even watch Heather Heyer, the anti-racism activist, being mowed down and killed.

Despite all its faults, “BlacKkKlansman” is urgent, painful, necessary for us to see and absorb. This is our collective national cross, and in our current political environment it has become heavier than ever.

“BlacKkKlansman” is playing in Great Barrington, Mass. It will open in Millerton, N.Y., next Friday.