United against the the Colorado Klansmen
B(15) ASED ON the 2014 memoir of Ron Stallworth, Colorado Spring’s first African American police officer, Spike Lee’s new film BlacKkKlansman (yes, it’s not a typo) uses a true story from 1979 to comment on today’s politics.
Produced by Oscar-winning director Jordan Peel (Get Out), and released a year after the events of Charlottesville where an anti-racist activist died protesting against the far-right organisations marching through the town chanting anti-black and anti-Jewish slogans, BlacKkKlansman doesn’t hold back on the parallels it seeks to draw between the Trump presidency and some of the darkest times in America’s history.
The year is 1979 and, after graduating from university, Stallworth (played impressively by Denzel Washington’s son John David Washington ) becomes a cop in Colorado Spring.
After an initially shaky start, Stallworth is asked to go undercover and infiltrate the black student movement. And complications arise when Ron falls for student president Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier) who has no idea that he is a cop.
When he comes across an advert placed in the local paper by the KKK, Ron mischievously calls the number to recruit, using his own name. To his surprise, Stallworth is summoned by gullible local chapter leader Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold) to meet.
Unable to attend the meeting himself for obvious reasons, Ron ropes in his reluctant Jewish colleague Flip (played with subtlety by Adam Driver) to go to the meeting instead.
Presenting a mixture between pure comedy and moments of sobering horror, Spike Lee has managed to strike the right balance between remaining informative while allowing himself a degree of aesthetic self-indulgence in his homage to 70s Blaxploitation cinema.
Offering up some real Klan members, including infamous leader David Duke (Topher Grace), as ridiculous figures, Lee does an impressive job in pointing out the stupidity of racism while refusing to downplay the importance of standing up to it.
Lee and his team of writers are also careful to include a strong Jewish narrative by portraying Flip Zimmerman as someone whose own ethnicity catches up with him when he is faced by pure hatred, despite spending most of his life refusing to be defined by his Jewishness.
Dedicating its closing minutes to footage from Charlottesville last year, BlacKkKlansman left me with a feeling of dread, anger and a huge sense of sadness to see history repeating itself once again.