Spike Lee gets under the skin of American racism

is just as audacious, breathtaking and useful as Lee’s fans have come to expect.

The film’s first image is the magnificent crane shot from

where Scarlett O’Hara desperately makes her way through hundreds of wounded and dying Confederate soldiers, and the camera pulls up and back to reveal the massive extent of the carnage visited upon white Southerners during the Civil War.

It’s a bravura moment, one of the most iconic in the cinematic canon, and Lee proceeds to give it a swift revisionist kick, using it to launch a lacerating tutorial in the history of American racism, white identity politics, paranoia and terrorism that begins as a study in artifacts from the past – including a slicked-back, bespectacled Alec Baldwin delivering a speech about miscegenation and the dangers of a mongrel nation – but that ends sounding utterly of-the-moment. The core narrative of

is about Ron Stallworth, who in the early 1970s became the first African American detective in the Colorado Springs police department, and through a series of bizarre accidents and mistaken identities managed to infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

We meet Stallworth (John David Washington) as he’s being interviewed to be the “Jackie Robinson” of the local force.

Lee styles and frames Washington like a blaxploitation hero, his Afro perfectly picked out, his sense of cool unruffled and impenetrable FRO YO: John David Washington an Lee’s latest film,