The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
‘BlacKkKlansman’ is Spike Lee’s best, and most necessary, movie in years
Among Spike Lee’s prodigious filmmaking talents, opening sequences are perhaps his most distinctive. He creates ambitious, operatic overtures for his films, minimovies that introduce viewers to the stories and themes they’re about to encounter, as well as plunge them into the precise kind of dream-state necessary to best appreciate what’s to come.
The introductory sequence to “BlacKkKlansman” 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 “Gone With the Wind,” wherein 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. 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 but that ends sounding utterly ofthe-moment.
The core narrative of “BlacKkKlansman” 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.
Narratively, the film is uneven. While going undercover to a Stokely Carmichael rally Stallworth meets an attractive college student (Laura Harrier), with whom he will debate the relative efficacy of radical and reformist politics. Later, when he sees a recruitment ad for the local KKK, he impulsively calls, forgetting to use an assumed name. With that, an alternately tense and amusing game of cat-and-mouse ensues, with Stallworth engaging the Klan leader in revealing and perhaps incriminating phone conversations, and sending his colleague Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) out to play him in real life, despite their sounding nothing like one another.
Lee structures “BlacKkKlansman” like a crackerjack procedural, punctuated by jaunty humor and “Mod Squad” team dynamics. The tonal balance is tricky, and it isn’t helped by the filmmaker’s penchant for making his most trenchant arguments with blunt, billboardlike speeches and on-the-nose comparisons to the toxic environment of today.
Even at its clunkiest, though, “BlacKkKlansman” is wildly entertaining and wisely prescient, connecting the dots between Duke’s goal of taking racism mainstream with the modern rhetoric around affirmative action and immigration, and dramatizing a combination of guns, alcohol, sexual insecurity and racial impunity that would be ridiculous if it weren’t so deadly.
It’s a grievous, galvanizing and gracefully executed coda that could only be conceived by one of our most forceful polemicists and poets. “BlacKkKlansman” winds up being Lee’s best and most necessary movie in years, confronting his audience with facts no less urgent for being painful to see clearly, much less accept: This is our cinema. This is our history. This burning cross is ours to bear. This is America.