Spike Lee nails every target in rollicking KKK comedy
Spike Lee is back on thunderclap form with Blackkklansman, his true-life account of a black cop in Seventies Colorado Springs who managed to get himself enrolled in the KKK. Following 2015’s terrifically lively Chi-raq and Lee’s TV spin-off of She’s Gotta Have It, this is yet more comeback fuel, attacking the spectre of white supremacism in America with mic-dropping aplenty, and thrusting its grievances right through the letterbox of the current White House.
A heady hybrid of comedy, polemic and period crime drama, it could have been scattergun stuff, and there are patches of preachy overkill. Much more often, though, there’s a rollicking drive and focus, which could have something to do with Jordan (Get Out) Peele’s involvement in a producing capacity. The film channels the fury of Lee’s satirical indignation for populist thrills and spills: as such, it’s sure to reach his biggest audience since Inside Man (2006), and fully deserves to.
Before the plot proper starts, Lee opens fire by excerpting a shot from Gone with the Wind, with Vivien Leigh picking her way through the (entirely white) war wounded. Nuggets of film history pepper the movie, including the oft-cited fact that The Birth of a Nation was used as a KKK recruitment tool. Meanwhile, Alec Baldwin has a fourth-wall-breaking cameo, indulgent but forgivable, as far-right spokesman Dr Kennebrew Beauregard.
With bursts of sax from Terence Blanchard’s swaggering score, we’re then introduced to Ron Stallworth, played underneath a whopping afro by John David (son of Denzel) Washington. The rookie cop is fed up of menial duties and pleads with his boss (an excellent Robert John Burke) to let him go undercover – and so he finds himself picking up the phone to the Klan’s local chapter. Still, a personal introduction, as a black guy, is clearly not going to fly.
In steps Adam Driver, on splendidly Undercover: Adam Driver and John David Washington in Blackkklansman aloof, chilled-out form as Flip, a Jewish station colleague who humours Ron more than exactly respecting him. While Ron does the legwork on the phone, Flip poses as him physically, dishing out their agreed cover story to win over the local chapter’s hick racists – well, all except Felix (a scowling Jasper Pääkkönen), whose unending suspicion is going to take work.
Washington, the spit of his father in the He Got Game era, gives a stoic, beefily charismatic performance, and undeniably owns the movie.
Ron and Flip thoroughly manage to fool KKK Grand Wizard David Duke (an amusingly lightweight Topher Grace), who is pointedly equated throughout with Trump. I, Tonya’s Paul Walter Hauser has another plum redneck role, too, as Ivanhoe, the chapter’s most egregiously thick member.
The stupidity of these clowns makes them very easy targets, but Lee unashamedly claps them in the stocks, along with every wielder of the N-word – some wearing police badges – he can get his hands on. Lee doesn’t need to remind us about Trump’s “very fine people” defence of Charlottesville’s neo-nazis, but it’s very much his style to do exactly that, jumping from cross-burning on the lawn to phone camera footage from the protests in 2017. Easily the most violent images, in fact, come in the form of documentary evidence that American bigotry is anything but a thing of the past.
No one will race to Blackkklansman for new perspective, so much as a despairing overview pumped out with refreshing playfulness. The film has some spotty passages, but when has it ever been otherwise with Lee? He exists to be uneven. Besides, watching him casually nail these sitting-duck targets, given all the spleen and sharpshooting we know he’s capable of, is actually very funny.