'Fight the Power'

A great American director returns to incendiary form in ‘BlacKkKlansman’

Like the protagonist of his 1989 masterpiece, “Do the Right Thing,” Spike Lee just shattered the storefront windows of America’s multiplexes in a show of righteous outrage.

Exactly one year after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., where white supremacist demonstrations against the removal of confederate monuments exploded in deadly violence against counter-protestors, the politically outspoken auteur has delivered his cinematic response. It’s one of the best films of the year, and of his iconic career.

Lee is a provocateur with a sincere moral vision. At his best, he wields satire and rage with equal force. In that same spirit, “BlacKkKlansman” is an impassioned commentary on the current state of America, refracted through the prism of a true story from forty years ago.

In 1978, rookie cop Ron Stallworth became the first African-American officer on the Colorado Springs police force. His race quickly became a coveted undercover asset. His ambition, however, led to a bizarre twist: Stallworth became a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Starting with a phone call in response to a KKK recruitment ad, Stallworth—played here by John David Washington, son of past Spike Lee collaborator Denzel Washington—quickly ingratiated himself to the local neo-Nazi chapter by pretending to be a white supremacist. When they extended a formal invite to join, Stallworth partnered with a fellow white detective who posed as Ron in the face-to-face subterfuge. (The real identity of the white cop was never revealed; he’s fictionalized here as Flip Zimmerman, a Jew passing as a WASP, played by Adam Driver.)

Complicating these efforts, both logistically and personally, is the fact that Stallworth has infiltrated a group of young black radicals. He even begins dating the group’s president, Patrice (Laura Harrier), a cop-hating student activist. Lee uses that relationship to weave in passionate yet considered debates about police, government, and society that the black community has been having for more than 50 years.

As the Klan’s actions escalate, including a visit from the new Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace), tensions explode. It peaks in a sequence that intercuts between the perversity of a KKK initiation and the lament of an aging civil rights warrior (in an inspired, surprise cameo from a living legend) who describes the horrors of a mob lynching to a room of young black activists. Reminiscent of the climactic Baptism of Fire from “The Godfather,” the jarring dissonance between the two left this reviewer shaken.

John David Washington makes an auspicious breakthrough as Stallworth. Laura Harrier exerts a commanding strength as Patrice—and, as Flip, Adam Driver continues his unassuming ascent as one of the best actors of his generation.

Then there’s Topher Grace as David Duke, the man who tried to take white nationalism mainstream. Could there be a less threatening personification of whiteness than Grace? Never sinking to easy caricature, he infuses Duke with an insidiously earnest conviction.

Each of these four central performances are remarkable and award-worthy, and Lee attacks this story, its relevance, and its troubling implications with a scorching, prophetic vitality that his films haven’t boasted in more than 20 years. A few recent ones have tried, admirably, but they’ve felt like a filmmaker struggling, even straining, to say something.

Here, there is no struggle. Lee clearly has something to say, latent yet boiling, from a place that has been shut up deep within his bones.

    It’s shut no more.