Deep Undercover

A detective gets an unlikely assignment in BlacKkKlansman.

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THERE’S SOMETHING important to know when you see Spike Lee’s explosive BlacKkKlansman, which is based on the bizarre exploits of black Colorado Springs undercover detective Ron Stallworth: Since Lee’s days as an NYU graduate film student, he has publicly stewed over D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and wanted to savage it onscreen—which he does here, definitively. In one of BlacKkKlansman’s most stunning scenes, Stallworth (John David Washington) watches Ku Klux Klan initiates and their proud families at a screening of Griffith’s film: They’re repulsed on cue when shiftless blacks take over a southern legislature, enraged when a pure white virgin throws herself off a cliff rather than submit to a black man, and enraptured when the holy Klan gallops in to avenge the death, dumping the black man’s corpse in his town as a warning. Lee himself has a propagandist streak, and he knows nothing ever sold the message of white emasculation and the existential necessity of keeping blacks down as well as Griffith’s 1915 film. It revived the Klan and—insult to injury—is still reckoned a landmark of narrative filmmaking. If there were no other reason to make BlacKkKlansman, this one would be good enough.