At the end of “Malcolm X,” Spike Lee’s formidable bio-pic of 1992, we see a bunch of schoolkids, standing up in turn to announce, “I’m Malcolm X.” Thus is the hero of the film, played with charismatic self-command by Denzel Washington, presented as the Spartacus of his people. Now, twenty-six years later, in Lee’s latest movie, “BlacKkKlansman,” one of those kids, John David Washington, gets a leading role for himself. He is the son of Denzel, and, like his father before him, he owns the screen. Both are graceful, thoughtful, and unrushed, keeping their wits at the heart of an inflammatory tale—not to douse it but to control the course of its fury. If there is a Washington method, it is this: stay cool, and feed the flame.
The title of the new film doesn’t lie. Washington plays Ron Stallworth, a smart young fellow who, in the late nineteen-seventies, does two surprising things. One, he becomes a cop in Colorado Springs—the first African-American to do so, or, in his superior’s words, “the Jackie Robinson of the Colorado Springs police force.” Two, he infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan. The story sounds so outrageous that you’re not sure whether to laugh, and, better yet, it happens to be true. The real Stallworth recounted his experiences in a memoir, “Black Klansman,” which serves as the basis for Lee’s film. One of the producers is Jordan Peele, the maker of “Get Out.” Everything is primed for provocation. The stage is set.
Initially, Ron is consigned to the records room, fetching files for other officers. One of them piques him with racist jibes, but Ron doesn’t strike back; he merely takes a long, long time to do the fetching. As we follow his slow steps, leaden with rebuke, we realize that Washington’s every gesture, from here on, will be worth watching. Motion equals emotion. Look at the casual manner with which the main plot gets going, as Ron, now shifted from records to undercover work, leafs through the local paper, finds an advertisement for the Klan, complete with a phone number, and dials it. As simple as that.
Ron’s only mistake is to leave a message using his real name. Even more problematic is the speed with which Walter (Ryan Eggold), a Klan organizer, calls him back, all eagerness, and proposes that they meet. Ron agrees. “God bless white America,” he says, signing off. A plan is soon devised: Ron will be Ron on the phone, while a colleague, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), will be Ron in the flesh, attending Klan events and wearing a wire. Can they pull off the double act? How about the difference in their voices—won’t it give them away? Their boss, the laconic Bridges (Robert John Burke), has his doubts, but Ron is reassuring. “Some people speak the King’s English, others speak jive,” he says. “I, Ron Stallworth here, happen to be fluent in both.”
That’s not a bad guide to the movie. If required, it opts for a formal restraint; Ron, during his job interview, holds steady at the center of the frame. Something similar occurs when he is ordered to check out Stokely Carmichael, now known as Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins), the former Black Panther who’s come to town to address a student gathering. For Chief Bridges, Ture smacks of trouble, but to his audience, including the president of the student union, Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), he’s a seer, foretelling the advent of a righteous revolution. As Ture declaims (and Hawkins gets the pulse of his speech to perfection), his disciples chant in response, and the screen fills with their faces, blooming in and out of the darkness; the result may bear an unfortunate resemblance to the original video for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but the effect is rousing nonetheless. Meanwhile, Ron stays still, marooned in the crowd, and trapped between his duty as an officer of the law and his deep, imperishable faith in the black cause. Should he raise a fist in solidarity, or not? Later, he will chide Patrice, on whom he has a growing crush, for referring to policemen as pigs.
Then, there’s the jive. Ever since the jump cuts of Lee’s début feature, “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), recently resurrected as a TV series, he has abided by the rule that the best way to prick the conscience is to shock the eye. No other director, it’s fair to say, would show a serial killer receiving his instructions from a talking Labrador, as Lee did in “Summer of Sam” (1999). The shocks delivered by “BlacKkKlansman” are no less startling, and are frequently bound up with other films. After an opening clip from “Gone with the Wind,” in which the camera cranes high over Scarlett as she walks among the Confederate wounded and dead, we get Alec Baldwin as a white supremacist, rehearsing—and fluffing—his litany of loathings against a backdrop of news footage. (He is never seen again.) There’s a sudden montage of blaxploitation-movie posters, including “Cleopatra Jones” and “Coffy,” both from 1973, plus the courtly spectacle of Harry Belafonte, no less, holding a room in his thrall as he commemorates a racial atrocity from 1916. Weirdest of all is a party of happy Klansmen, watching “Birth of a Nation” (1915) and leaping up to laud the scenes in which their forerunners, robed in spotless white, ride to the rescue of a pure America.
This is not the only occasion on which Lee has done battle with the Klan. “The Answer,” the film he made in his first year at grad school at N.Y.U., and which almost got him kicked out of the program, was about a black writer-director who is hired to remake “Birth of a Nation.” Nothing in Lee’s career is better than his 1997 documentary “4 Little Girls,” which tells of the black girls who were killed in 1963 by a bomb at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. The device was planted by a group with links to the Klan, and Lee wastes no time in laying forth the acrid ironies. As a white attorney claims that “the fifties were a time of quietness here. Wonderful place to live and raise a family,” we see a line of citizens from that period, parading along the street, in daylight. Most of them, including a child, are dressed in the uniform of the K.K.K. A pastor of another church, bombed by the Klan some years before, recalls a burly cop, in the explosion’s wake, saying, “I really didn’t believe that they would go this far.”
You might well think the same, when you first encounter the villains of “BlacKkKlansman.” They don’t look like a menace to society. They look like idiots. One is eternally drunk. Another suspects Flip, correctly, of being Jewish, asking, “Is your dick circumstanced?” As for their efforts to seem hallowed and secretive, what a joke; Flip is solemnly informed that membership will be ten dollars, “robes and hoods are not included.” But here’s the thing: fools can be dangerous, especially if enough of them club together, and Lee, more agile than he’s been since “Do the Right Thing” (1989), keeps giving us what feels like a firm comic handle on the action, only to tug it away. How should we react when a Klansman’s beaming wife cuddles up to him in bed and says, “We’ve talked about killing niggers for so many years, and now it’s really happening!,” as if discussing an ocean cruise? Or when she struggles, like a total doofus, to stuff a wad of explosives into somebody’s mailbox?
Personally, faced with this lurch of tones, I still prefer the sobriety of “4 Little Girls,” and I loved the quieter moments in “BlacKkKlansman”—when Flip, for instance, scalded by the anti-Semitic vitriol of the Klan, admits that he never used to think about his Jewishness, and adds, “Now I’m thinking about it all the time.” (Ron has already nudged him with a friendly reproach: “Why you acting like you ain’t got skin in the game?”) No one in today’s cinema is more adept than Adam Driver at being caught in the act of reflection, and to be there, as a viewer, for the raising of a character’s consciousness is a kind of intimate political thrill.
Most of the film, though, is a more fevered affair, and Lee would contend, I guess, that the sober approach will no longer suffice—that the age we inhabit is too drunk on its own craziness. He has a point. Throughout “BlacKkKlansman,” topical hints are not so much dropped as sprayed around; we hear cries of “America first,” and calls for the country to “achieve its greatness again.” Remind you of anybody? We also get Topher Grace as David Duke (then, as now, the holy father of the K.K.K.), in a performance so blandly creepy that one feels half guilty for enjoying it. Just as we’re wondering what Duke will make of so scurrilous a portrayal (“Go ahead and sue,” the movie seems to say), the man himself appears. There he is on TV, in 2017, orating proudly about the events in Charlottesville, Virginia—the clashes between supremacists and their opponents, which involved, according to President Trump, “very fine people on both sides.” Then we see Trump in person. Then the Stars and Stripes, turned upside down and rendered in black and white. (Not even Jasper Johns went that far.) By now, Spike Lee has pretty much abandoned the story of Ron Stallworth—amazing as it is—and started waving the flag of wrath. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to end this blistering movie. He just doesn’t want to. He’s got skin in the game, and the game is getting worse. He won’t stop. ♦
