Spike Lee’s return to directing with BlacKkKlansman has been met with wide critical acclaim and a positive commercial response, with the film earning back its reported budget in its first week of release. The film is based on the true story of African-American cop Ron Stallworth, who infiltrated a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan while working in the Colorado Springs Police Department, surrounded by white officers, detailed in Stallworth’s memoir Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime.) Stallworth paired with a white partner who was his stand-in at KKK meetings, and eventually managed to speak to and meet David Duke, while revealing that there were members of the chapter who worked in law enforcement, the military, and, in two cases, NORAD. (Those last two were allegedly reassigned to Greenland or somewhere else in the Arctic.) Lee invents a few details and then intersperses the story with vignettes that are far more clearly targeted at the modern audience, closing with footage from the neo-Nazi rally and the eventual murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last year. It’s a powerful story that offers no pretense about its ideals or what viewers should think and do in this era of New Racism, and is by turns terrifically funny and intense. It’s also a total mess of a film that reeks of the director’s self-indulgence and eventually works to undermine some of its most important messages.
BlacKkKlansman is at its best when Lee focuses the story on the investigation as it was led by two men, Stallworth (John David Washington) and Phillip “Flip” Zimmerman (Adam Driver). After about 30 minutes of prologue that gives some backdrop to the racial animus in the country at the time and gets Stallworth into the police department under its minority hiring initiative – and exiles him to the records room – he makes the fateful phone call in response to an ad in a local paper, looking for new members, from the local chapter of the Klan. Stallworth calls, tells the man on the phone how much he hates black people and every other group the Klan was known for targeting, and is invited to a meeting that Friday night, which is a problem given the color of his skin. He recruits Zimmerman to go in his stead, under his name, wearing a wire, which begins the investigation that, in reality, lasted nine months and uncovered those members’ identities. (The film creates a fictional, planned bombing that never happened, but that does allow for an intense climatic scene that drowns in its own bathos as the overwritten script piles clichés on top of a pivotal moment.)
Lee appears to have been given a free hand with the project, which was produced by Jordan Peele (who was set to direct it but gave it to Lee to work on other films), and I wonder if Peele felt unable or unwilling to confront one of the most important figures in black American cinema over some of the film’s many bombastic or incoherent sequences. There are gimmicks galore here, such as the isolated head shots of black audience members listening to Kwame Ture and the hallway scene near the film’s conclusion, that are nothing more than directorbation, the film equivalent of an umpshow, where Lee has to remind us that he’s at the wheel and we are watching an artist at work. One of the film’s many interludes from the Stallworth narrative itself is the Klan initiation rite, where Stallworth’s partner attends in his stead and David Duke presides, showing the racist 1916 film Birth of a Nation to whip the members (and their wives) into a frenzy. Lee intersperses that with scenes from a black student union meeting at the local college – I think it’s University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, but wasn’t sure if it was named as such – where a man, played by Harry Belafonte, tells the story of the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, in 1917. Belafonte’s character was a close friend of Washington’s, but the character and the meeting appear to be fabricated for the film, although the grotesque torture-murder of Washington was very real, attended by thousands of whites as if the castration, mutilation, and slow immolation of a black teenager were merely the day’s entertainment.
The unexpected star of the film isn’t Washington – yes, that’s Denzel’s son – but Driver, who delivers a nuanced, two-sided performance as a cop who finds his stolid attitude that any case is just part of the job affected by his exposure to such inveterate hate, while also posing as a very convincing racist, anti-Semitic zealot. (Zimmerman’s character is a non-observant Jew, but the real undercover officer, known only as “Chuck” in Stallworth’s memoir, was not.) He’s so magnetic in the role that the film lags when he’s out of the dialogue, which I’d say is the opposite of the effect he has as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise. Washington is fine, but isn’t charismatic enough to be the center of the film, and he’s often overshadowed by others on screen including Driver; Topher Grace as a dead ringer for David Duke; and Laura Harrier as Patrice, Stallworth’s (fictional) love interest and President of the Black Students’ Union in the film. Corey Hawkins has a small part earlier in the film as Ture that is a clinic in delivering a rhetorical speech, although it’s again blunted by those camera tricks Lee employs to remind us he’s in charge.
For a film with a deadly serious subject, BlacKkKlansman doesn’t skimp on the humor. There’s a Wire reference near the start of the film that had me laughing very loudly – and I was the only one in the theater who did so – although I was disappointed not to hear Paul Walter Hauser drop an “incorrect” somewhere to nod to his scene-stealing performance in last year’s I, Tonya. The allusions to our modern era of ‘very fine people’ can go too far – Stallworth telling his white sergeant that Americans would never put an openly racist person in the White House is a bit too on the nose – but work well when Lee steps back and lets the dialogue and/or action show us how little has actually changed. An early scene when Patrice and Ture are stopped for driving while black and then threatened and assaulted by the officers, while also fictional, is extremely effective for how it just tells a story and lets the audience connect the dots. The telling of the Washington lynching might have been more effective as a straight scene, rather than one cut back and forth to the frothing Klan members watching and cheering on Birth of a Nation. The film just needed less of these trappings and more of the basics. The scenery, the clothes, and the hairstyles all set the scene incredibly well; even little touches like background colors in offices or the weaker lighting in some of the scenes in Klan members’ houses (so the film looks like movies or TV shows from the time period) contribute to the atmosphere. The one gimmick that really works, the transition to Charlottesville footage, with a clip of Trump referring to violent neo-Nazis as “very fine people” just in case anyone still wondered where his sympathies lie, is a masterstroke – but it’s the only gimmick BlacKkKlansman needed. Instead we get a half-dozen on top of that, so by the time you get to the end of the film, you’re exhausted from trying to figure out where any of this is going.
Note: The Slate piece discussing what’s real and what’s fictional in this film was essential in writing this review.
