Written byCharlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee
ProducersJason Blum, Spike Lee, Raymond Mansfield, Sean McKittrick, Jordan Peele, Shaun Redick
StarringJohn David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace
MusicTerence Blanchard
CinematographyChayse Irvin
Spike Lee has built a career on films about social and political issues, and they’re often labeled “controversial.” His latest “joint,” BlacKkKlansman, will probably draw the same label, but it’s a story that needs to be told.
Based on a true story, the film stars John David Washington as Ron Stallworth, the first Black detective in the Colorado Springs police department. After answering a Klan recruitment ad, he starts a dangerous investigation with his White partner, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). The setup is as strange as it sounds: Stallworth handles the Klan over the phone, while Zimmerman plays him in every face-to-face encounter.
Washington and Driver are the standouts. Washington balances comedy and drama really well. Some of the funniest scenes are his phone calls with Klan leader David Duke (Topher Grace), where Stallworth has to play a racist. They’re mostly played for laughs, but Washington never lets go of the film’s seriousness, and he slips easily between Detective Stallworth and the “Klansman” Stallworth.
Driver is just as good as Zimmerman, who is Jewish. His scenes are the ones that make you squirm, and that’s not the performance’s fault. It’s because this is where we actually see the Klan up close. The most disturbing thing about them is how ordinary they look: cookouts, poker games, friends hanging out. A few of these scenes are funny, but none of them are light, and the unease of lingering prejudice never goes away.
Lee also makes some stylistic choices I loved. At a campus rally where former Black Panther Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins) speaks, the camera picks out individual students’ faces and lets the background fall to black. It shows how powerfully his words land, and for a moment you feel a small sliver of what those students felt.
The score stuck with me too. Lee’s longtime collaborator Terence Blanchard is back, and the music pays tribute to the sound of the ’70s while giving Stallworth an iconic theme that lifts some of the film’s most emotional moments.
The one thing that felt out of place was Stallworth’s relationship with his girlfriend, Patrice (Laura Harrier). Harrier is fine, but her scenes are spaced so far apart that they play like commercial breaks. Still, they let Washington show off his flirtatious side and give Patrice a chance to shine as a strong, independent woman, so the interruptions are easy to forgive.
The most compelling and relevant part of the film, though, is its message. Lee uses actual clips from The Birth of a Nation (1915), one of cinema’s most infamous pieces of racist propaganda, to show that his film is its exact opposite. It deals with racism without endorsing it, and it offers hope that people of all races can someday coexist and even work together, like Stallworth and Zimmerman. It also reminds us that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
It’s not hard to see the parallels between the world of the film and the one we live in today, and that’s a tough pill to swallow. Lee didn’t just hand us a movie. He gave us a blunt commentary on the racism that still lingers in this country. Often funny and often crushing, BlacKkKlansman is beautifully crafted, and its message is potent and timely, a reminder that we may not be as “progressive” as we like to think.
