Spike nails it with Klan tale
BlacKkKlansman (RP13, 135 mins) Directed by Spike Lee Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★1⁄2
True story. In 1970s Colorado, a black man joined the Ku Klux Klan. Ron Stallworth was a young police-officer when he hit on the idea of infiltrating ‘‘The Organisation’’.
He picked up the phone, told the credulous man on the other end of the line that he hated – insert every unprintable racial pejorative you can think of here – and was immediately invited to come on down and meet the guys.
Stallworth recruited an undercover officer he knew he could trust and sent him along to be ‘‘Stallworth’’. Over the next nine months, ‘‘Stallworth’’ passed back invaluable intelligence on the Klan’s organisation and plans, prevented several acts of domestic terrorism and befriended ‘‘Grand Wizard’’ David Duke.
Watching BlacKkKlansman – Spike Lee’s adaptation of Stallworth’s memoir – I assumed several of the film’s juiciest moments must be invention or exaggeration. But no. The undercover ‘‘Stallworth’’ really was proposed as the next chapter president.
And the Black Stallworth truly was assigned as security detail when Duke visited Colorado.
Lee has the nerve and the knowledge to bring laughter to this thorny and often revolting true story. And he proves from the opening moments that he still knows how to make our laughter curl up and die in our throats.
BlacKkKlansman is engaging, hilarious, and still topical-as-hell 40 years later and ringingly smart film from the startlingly prolific and restless Lee.
Lee deftly draws the threads from Civil War revisionism to 1978 Colorado and then on to Charlottesville, 2017. It’s beautifully done, detracts nothing from the BlacKkKlansman narrative, but still sent me out into the night reeling.
In the leads, John David Washington (son of Denzel) essays Stallworth as an urbane, ceaselessly curious and quietly rebellious man, constantly interrogating his belief that it is possible to change the system from within. Next to Washington, Adam Driver is as fine as ever as the unflappable and heroic cop and friend Stallworth co-opted into being ‘‘him’’ at Klan meetings.
Topher Grace is disconcerting as the reptilian Duke, and Laura Harrier (Spiderman: Homecoming) does her career no harm at all as a civil rights activist and ally of Stallworth.
After Chi-Raq and his unnecessary Old Boy remake,
BlacKkKlansman finds Lee back in irresistible form. All the crimethriller chops that set Inside Man on fire are here, but paired with a furious broadside at the new dawn of bigotry in America today and its tacit enabler in the White House.
BlacKkKlansman is Lee at his furious best. And, as ever, he knows that the only effective way to communicate fury is with wit, skill, good humour, and warmth.
BlacKkKlansman is deeply political and angry. It is also a fantastically entertaining way to spend a couple of hours.