USA TODAY International Edition
Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKkKlansman’ is no laugh riot
The filmmaker and his film, based on a true story, tackle the racial divide from the Klan’s birth to Charlottesville.
Don’t be fooled by the Afros, groovy tunes and boogie nights: “BlacKkKlansman” is not a period piece. It’s a point Spike Lee would like emphasized on this sunny afternoon at Cannes Film Festival. “Can you say that again?” the director asks, as he sits on a terrace overlooking the blue Mediterranean. His latest film, “BlacKkKlansman”(in theaters Friday), earned a prolonged standing ovation at its Cannes debut. The film draws a solid through line from the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to present day, basing its plot on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a young black cop (played by John David Washington) who infiltrated the KKK in the early 1970s in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“BlacKkKlansman” closes with footage from last year’s fatal white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The film arrives at the one-year anniversary of the riots.
Trumpisms, from “America First” to “Make America Great Again,” are peppered throughout the script a pointed choice by Lee and co-writer Kevin Willmott (“Chi-Raq”).
“Where that comes from is the 1920s, the second birth of the Klan,” says Willmott. “One of their main slogans was ‘America First.’ And then it took on another level in the 1930s with Charles Lindbergh and the American Nazi party. If you look at photographs, there are huge marches ... with ‘America First’ right out front.”
Sitting at Cannes with Washington, all three say they still experience insidious racism.
“I still at times can’t catch a cab,” says Lee, pointing to headlines made when cops were called on innocent African-Americans. Washington nods, saying he was followed by a suspicious sales clerk in a big-box store in New York.
“I’ve had friends on a bus going to school in Kansas, and people get on the bus and say, ‘White power!’ now,” says Willmott, who has taken extra security measures as he teaches. Thanks to Kansas’ concealed carry laws, “I teach in a bulletproof vest,” he says.
“BlacKkKlansman” began with a call from producer Jordan Peele, who “called me out of the blue,” says Lee. “He said, ‘Well, a black man joins the KKK ...’ Automatically, I thought of the Dave Chappelle skit.”
“The black white supremacist!” Washington says, referencing a sketch in which Chappelle plays a blind black man who joins the KKK, unaware that he isn’t white.
In the film, Washington and Adam Driver play undercover cops who infiltrate a Klan chapter. By phone, the KKK unknowingly interfaces with Stallworth’s rookie cop.
“If anything, I was more aware of it as a kid growing up in Indiana, because there were always Klan rallies, like, every summer,” says Driver.
To find his star, Lee turned to Washington (son of Denzel), whom he has known since the actor was a baby.
The director gave Washington a small background role in 1992’s “Malcolm X.” “I’ve since matured as an artist,” says Washington with a grin.
“The Washingtons and the Lees, we’re tight,” Lee says. “But if he couldn’t act – it comes down to ‘Is he going to be able to carry this film onscreen?’ ”