Fight The White Power

A crazy but true story from the 1970s is the spark for Spike Lee’s explosive movie about current American race relations.

- Alex Bilmes

The American West, in the late 1970s. A rookie black cop—the first to serve with the Colorado Springs Police Department— picks up his phone, dials the number for the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (they’ve bought a classified ad in the paper), poses as a white supremacist—causing much mirth in the station house, which is home to a few of those already—and is invited to a meeting. In his place, for fairly obvious reasons, he sends a fellow officer, who happens to be a Jew.

BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee’s hair-raising new film, dramatises the Colorado cops’ undercover infiltration of ‘the Organisation’, an operation so complete that they are able to form a relationship of sorts with its reptilian leader, grand wizard David Duke, played with cunning anti-charm by Topher Grace. Praised as a return to form for its director when it was shown at Cannes in May—it won the Grand Prix—BlacKkKlansman is based on a memoir by Ron Stall worth, the black cop at its centre, surely the only African American police officer to have been given a KKK membership card. Stall worth’s is one of those peculiarly American stories so implausible it can only be true. Or, to put it in Lee speak, as the opening credits obligingly do: “Dis joint is based on some fo’ real, fo’ real shit.”

The resulting film—Lee’s statement on the Black Lives Matter movement, the hate-filled rhetoric of Donald Trump and the rise again of far-right extremism in America—is urgent and impassioned, righteously angry, impishly iconoclastic, riotously entertaining and maddeningly uneven. It’s like Lee’s long and unusual career in miniature, alternately punch-the-air brilliant and cover-your-eyes baffling.