NOW SHOWING
BlacKkKlansman David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace
MA 15+
Nick Dent
RATING: REVIEWER:
THE hunger for African-American stories has never been greater, with Hollywood movies in all kinds of genres triumphing at the box office: Hidden Figures, Creed, Get Out, Black Panther.
Now BlacKkKlansman arrives in the guise of a deep cover detective thriller, although it wears its true purpose – to arouse anger at racism in America – on its sleeve. It’s the largely true story of Ron Stallworth, an African-American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado in the 1970s and was even nominated to become the leader of a chapter of the anti-black, anti-Semitic organisation.
We meet Stallworth (played by Denzel’s son, John David Washington) as he’s joining the force, the first African-American to serve in his district. After a short time languishing in records, he’s given a plain-clothes task spying on a Black Power meeting, which puts his ability to separate his job from his beliefs to its first crucial test and introduces him to alluring student organiser Patrice (Laura Harrier).
Promoted to undercover work, Stallworth impetuously answers a KKK newspaper ad, claiming to “hate (N-words)”, and ends up joining the KKK by correspondence.
Over the phone he even gains the confidence of the Klan’s charismatic ‘grand wizard’, David Duke (Topher Grace). For face-to-face meetings with various Klan crazies he enlists his white colleague Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver).
But for the most part BlacKkKlansman achieves the feat of turning American hate into an appealing cinematic romp.