MOVIE BLACKKKLANSMAN

STARRING: John David Washington

Director Spike Lee’s latest is a wild satirical entertainment—funny, suspenseful and scalding—based on an improbable but true story from the 1970s. An African-american detective named Ron Stallworth (Denzel’s kid, Washington) establishes contact with the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan through telephone conversations: he mimics the voice and tone of a gung-ho white racist. Needless to say, Ron can’t go and openly mingle with a group of white supremacists at their clandestine meetings. Instead his partner, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), is sent out in the field as the “racist” Stallworth. But Flip has his own challenge: one Klansman suspects he’s Jewish. Lee keeps this complicated premise sprinting through two-plus hours thanks to his usual restless inventiveness—the camera work and editing are outstanding—before ending with a shot that telescopes the whole thing down to an incendiary image of racist terror. Washington, understated and handsome, has a deadpan stolidity that anchors the movie’s constant shifts of tone. These can occasionally throw you. Should former KKK grand wizard David Duke really be played by Topher Grace as if he were the concierge of a third-rate hotel? Well, yes, maybe he should. (Out now)