REVIEW: BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee has been around for a while, and through his career he has been able to reach an iconic status.  He has been extremely prolific over the years and has created some classic films.  Like every director, not all of his movies have been successes.  His last commercial hit was in 2006 with Inside Man, and he is back as strong as ever with BlacKkKlansman, which has made just shy of $90 million world wide.

Personally, I think the reason why this film has been such a hit is because of the passion that he has poured into it.  This is Spike Lee at his best, pushing and poking the audience in many different ways to get a reaction.  Some people may be rubbed the wrong way by some of Lee's movies (as they may well be with BlacKkKlansman), but he isn't out to please with some of his films.  He is an instigator and he wants you to think both about what you are seeing as well as how you are reacting.

In this film, we follow Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) as he becomes the first black man to serve as a police officer in the town of Colorado Springs in the 1970s.  He does not have a glorious beginning to his career, but through his ambition he soon gets undercover work infiltrating a rally held by a black civil rights activist who preaches revolution.  For his next investigation he responds to a recruitment ad in the newspaper for Ku Klux Klan members.  Over the phone, Stallworth pretends to be a white supremacist, gaining a chance to meet the Klan in person.  Obviously because of his race he is unable to do that part, and relies on the help of fellow detective Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to fill in for the face to face time.  As the investigation continues, Stallworth is on the over the phone persona, while Zimmerman does the in person work.

The process that the two detectives go through to gain membership into the KKK pushes both Zimmerman, who is Jewish, and Stallworth.  Spike Lee keeps us from seeing the personal effects that being in the orbit of such toxic people would create.  The two are professions, and, for the most part, able to keep the investigation all business.  There are a few times that we do see the characters crack slightly, and the power that those scenes bring is subtle yet powerful.

John David Washington's portrayal as Stallworth is exceptional.  A lot of the larger emotions that he goes through are all internal, so the audience relies on a nuanced performance to understand the protagonist.  Nearing the end of the film, we do see the emotional side to Stallworth, and Lee makes sure those moments have maximum impact.  Like the build up to a good final confrontation in an action film, the emotions of Stallworth are teased to lead towards the payoff.

Spike Lee uses this film to look at both black radicalism as well as white radicalism.  While he is investigating both, he is far from putting both on par with each other.  One was born from the other, its existence solely a reaction to the devastation and societal oppression formed through the idea of white power.  I did get a feeling in one scene that Lee was putting the two beside each other to show that in some regards they may actually have some similarities.  Was that actually what Spike Lee was getting at?  I don't know.  As I said, he is an instigator, and he wants his audience to think about his content in numerous different ways.

BlacKkKlansman is a powerful film, that delivers both tension and comedy while looking at a true story.  There are some obvious dramatic interpretations added to the tale of Ron Stallworth, but the fact that a black man won his way into the Ku Klux Klan is a tremendous story.  Lee takes the concept and adds some richness, bringing us through the journey of Stallworth from investigating his own race, to pretending to be the worst of another race.  Other than a few small directorial choices of style that didn't quite work for me, this is a strong film that sadly ties to the present.  Racism will always be in our landscape.  It's the sad truth of the world we inhabit, and we probably won't evolve past that.  As long as we continue having artist like Spike Lee digging into this topic in intelligent ways, the idea of combatting racism will be impossible to forget.

Rating - 3.5 out of 4 stars