BlacKkKlansman: A deeply disturbing movie for our times

IT’S not a comedy but it is funny. It’s not a horror movie but it is horrifying, It’s set in the past but it is chillingly relevant to 2018.

IN 1972, an African-American police officer in Colorado Springs infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan.

Reading the paper one day, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) finds a recruitment ad for the local KKK chapter. He calls the number and says he wants to join, making up some cockamamie story about his sister being brutalised.

When he’s invited for a face-to-face meeting, Ron enlists a white Jewish detective, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), to be the Ron Stallworth, aspiring KKK member, he’s been playing on the phone. Between them, a black man and a Jewish man, they fool the KKK guys into believing Ron Stallworth is one of them.

He even manages to get David Duke (Topher Grace), the then-Grand Wizard and current Trump fanboy, on the phone, engaging him in “philosophical” chats about the supposed superiority of the white race while the cops snigger and laugh.

They stumble on a violent plot against the local college’s black student union president Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), which will coincide with a visit by Duke.

BlacKkKlansman is based on a true story (David Lee/Focus Features via AP)

Not every Klan member is the same — there are the idiotic hicks with their open, virulent racism, the archetype we think of when we think of KKK, but there are also the seemingly polite, good-natured guys, the Duke types who on the surface appear civil but have the same noxious substance coursing through their veins.

Director Spike Lee is careful to portray the full spectrum of racists, only then can you really expose the toxicity.

BlacKkKlansman is not a comedy but it is funny, it’s not a horror movie but it is horrifying, it’s a period movie but it is chillingly relevant to 2018.

Lee has been an inconsistent filmmaker throughout his career, ranging from incandescence to deeply flawed. But when he’s on form, when he’s excited, he can really put on a show, like he does here.

BlacKkKlansman is tense, thrilling and distressing but above all, what you sense is Lee’s palpable, unmistakeable rage at where Americans find themselves in 2018. An era in which a presidency has emboldened ugly and destructive attitudes to flourish, the same attitudes once driven into dark, dank corners, traded out for something resembling enlightenment and progress.

Despites its 1972 setting, Lee draws a clear line connecting then and now — the Klansmen make explicit references to Trump slogans “Make America Great Again” and “America First” while its casting of Alec Baldwin as a racist scientist invokes Baldwin’s iconic send-ups of Trump on Saturday Night Live.

Topher Grace as David Duke — the actor said his character/real-life person is a “terrible, evil man”.

Meanwhile, the deliberate emphasis on Ron’s “white” voice goes back to the racialised commentary on how “articulate” Barack Obama was during his candidacy. The movie’s anachronism is what makes it such a compelling but deeply disturbing story.

It’s replete with culturally significant black symbols - all the black characters sport an Afro, a visual representation of black pride - and Lee never relents from showing what it really means to be black in America.

How the director ends the movie, with video footage of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville last year before one of them drove their car through a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one, and Trump’s later insistence the hatemongers were “very fine people”, isn’t subtle, it’s a sledgehammer approach. But being delicate wasn’t the point.

Lee understands too well the power of storytelling in a mass medium. BlacKkKlansman opens with footage from Gone with the Wind, the 1939 epic that embodies the Lost Cause narrative of the Confederacy in the US Civil War. He also embeds scenes from D.W. Griffith’s racist 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation, a movie so influential that it revitalised the dormant Klan and sparked a new wave of nativism in the US.

Lee is using the same medium to craft a story with an emotional gut-punch, a wake-up call for the apathetic. BlacKkKlansman is a film that needs to be seen.

Rating: ★★★★

BlacKkKlansman is in cinemas from Thursday, August 16.

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