BlacKkKlansman

The latest cinematic treatise from iconoclastic filmmaker Spike Lee takes on Ron Stallworth’s 2014 memoir Black Klansman, which tells the fascinating story of the first African American on the Colorado Springs police force and his 1979 infiltration of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. With BlacKkKlansman, a one-word title that makes a striking, memorable graphic, and also differentiates this major motion picture from Ted V. Mikels’ totally fictional indie drama The Black Klansman (1966), Lee uses a remarkable but little-known historical episode to comment on contemporary times and issues. 

John David Washington, the son of Lee’s most frequent leading man Denzel Washington, stars as Stallworth, personifying him with a winning combination of youthful confidence and charisma. Though not an actor with a great deal of experience, Washington glides into this leading role with tremendous ease, playing both the drama and the comedy of the situation with equal skill. And unlike Lakeith Stanfield, who must share a key aspect of his performance with a voiceover actor in Boots Riley’s contemporaneous Sorry To Bother You, Lee lets Washington fully embody all the aspects of his character. 

Adam Driver plays the Jewish detective who becomes Stallworth’s white alter ego, Flip Zimmerman - a character based loosely on the cop known only as “Chuck” in the book - who took Stallworth’s place during face-to-face interactions with Klan members. Whenever I learn of Driver’s participation in a film, I always think, “Not this guy again,” but, as with everything from Lincoln, to Silence, to The Force Awakens, as soon as he appears on screen he instantly wins me over. His performance here achieves the same high standard, in that he makes an underwritten, fictional role feel nuanced and persuasive. Driver finds many layers to explore while never upstaging Washington, even though it’s his character that must put himself physically on the line when infiltrating the KKK. 

The movie’s biggest pleasures come from watching these two actors work together to create two halves of a one-of-a-kind undercover agent. But for a film about clandestine cops taking on a high-risk and unprecedented operation, BlacKkKlansman lacks tension and suspense. Lee may just be adhering to the spirit of Stallworth’s simple, straightforward book, which doesn’t present the Klan members he and his partner encountered as especially bright or dangerous. But Lee’s film takes so many liberties with the facts as laid out in the book that it’s surprising he doesn’t play up the threat of exposure. The stakes in this picture—apart from one invented scene involving a lie detector test administered at gunpoint by one of the most radical KKK members, Felix Kendrickson (Jasper Pääkkönen) feel surprisingly low. 

KKK members in Hollywood movies are usually depicted as either brutal men who wield or sanction the evilest of violence from positions of great societal power, or as dimwitted, drunk, tobacco-spitting buffoons. The depiction here falls closer to the latter. While Lee gives these white supremacists individual characteristics and personalities, collectively they come off as pretty ineffectual. Even when C4 explosives are introduced in the third act, the villains in this film are toothless.

The most engrossing aspects of Stallworth’s story come through the numerous phone calls he had over many months with KKK Grand Wizard David Duke (played with straightforward validity by Topher Grace). These conversations drive the narrative, insightfully make us laugh, and underscore and illuminate the fallacy of white supremacist thinking. Of course, phone chats are less cinematic than undercover police work, but Washington, Grace and the filmmakers convey the prominence of Stallworth’s months of desk work, shoe leather, and surveillance, and don’t allow those vital efforts to take a backseat to the imagined meetings between Zimmerman and KKK members. 

The filmmakers also give Stallworth a fictional love interest in Patrice Dumas, the president of the Black Student Union at Colorado College. Laura Harrier does her best with this underdeveloped, largely symbolic role—she’s meant to be a woman of deep convictions, yet we must accept that she would stay involved with Stallworth at all after learning he’s an undercover cop who started dating her under false pretenses while infiltrating her organization. Many of the movie’s invented characters play more like symbols than as actual people. A generic, two-dimensional racist cop named Landers (Fred Weller) inadequately represents the bigotry and harassment Stallworth must have experienced as the first black man to join an all-white police force in the early 1970s. 

Much of BlacKkKlansman suffers from a problem that plagues many movies based on true stories: filmmakers often think that just because something “really happened,” they don’t need to make it feel credible when depicting it in a narrative feature. So much of what occurs in this picture defies logic and plausibility. This lack of cogency is not limited to the fictionalized material—like the romance with Dumas or the use of Kendrickson’s wife, Connie (an unconvincing Ashlie Atkinson) in a plot to set off a bomb at a civil rights rally. Even some of the most compelling details that come straight from Stallworth’s book feel concocted. The true story of how the only black cop on the force wound up assigned as personal protection for David Duke when the KKK leader came to Colorado Springs, and then boldly made a fool of Duke during a photo op, comes across as a dramatic contrivance, rather than a jaw-dropping real-life occurrence. The time compression required when making a two-hour film from events that took place over a number of years often results in these lapses in credibility. Indeed, though Stallworth was still young when these events took place, he wasn’t exactly the rookie the film depicts. But the flaws that undercut BlacKkKlansman are more severe than the necessities of simplifying events or creating composite characters.

The script is credited to four writers, including Lee and Kevin Willmott, the co-writer of Lee’s 2015 political musical essay Chi-Raq. The final screenplay has the uneven feel of something that began as a straightforward adaptation of the book, which was hastily rewritten to conform to Lee’s particular passions and auteurist signatures. The unmistakable hand of the director is present in all of Lee’s pictures, even those he did not write or produce like 25th Hour (2002), and Inside Man (2006)—two of his best. Often, his directorial touches energize his material and endow it with additional levels of meaning. Much of Lee’s finest work benefits from him not only writing and directing but also producing and playing a key role—such as his early works She's Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze (1988), and his masterpiece Do the Right Thing (1989). But far too often, his stylistic and thematic preoccupations upstage the stories he tells. In addition to Lee’s distinctive humor, mastery of visual composition, and ability to create memorable yet everyday dialogue, BlacKkKlansman evidences his fondness for using expressionistic imagery in realistic situations, recycling lines of dialogue, images, and music cues from previous films, and commenting directly on current events happening outside of the movie’s internal narrative. All these aesthetic tactics pull us out of the story and undermine its power.

Also at play in this film is Lee’s fascination with the ways in which Hollywood has shaped American history. He opens BlacKkKlansman with the iconic crane shot from Gone with the Wind (1939).  D.W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation (1915) also plays a prominent role, which is historically accurate as the KKK continued to run that film for new recruits for most of the 20th Century (and perhaps still do). BlacKkKlansman deftly adopts the visual style of movies from the 1970s; the work of cinematographer Chayse Irvin as well as costume designer Marci Rodgers is distinct but unexaggerated. Yet Lee and his longtime editor, the brilliant Barry Alexander Brown, choose not to structure or pace the narrative like a movie from that period.  There are surface references to the Blaxploitation and interracial buddy cop pictures popular in the ’70s, but none of the edgy paranoia that underscore political thrillers from that decade like The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Serpico, or The Conversation. It’s difficult not to wonder how much more effective this story might have been had the filmmakers taken an approach that made us feel the visceral anxiety of what it must have been like to work undercover in these circumstances. Lee eschews the opportunity to make a tense ‘70s period piece like David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), which gets under our skin by playing like an actual artifact of that time. 

But Lee famously rejects period pictures. He believes they keep audiences at a safe remove, permitting them to look away from present day concerns and take comfort in the mistaken notion that things were so much worse “back then.” It’s a valid point. But Lee’s on-the-nose dialogue and other heavy-handed techniques for getting viewers to see parallels between past and present leave little room for us to reach our own conclusions. And truths we arrive at ourselves always pack more lasting power than those delivered to us in a sermon or artistic diatribe. Lee seems so focused on spoon-feeding his bullet points to the audience that he doesn’t notice how the subtext of the story he’s telling often runs counter to his intended message. After all, the white supremacists in this movie are depicted as easily defeated morons, barely capable of a successful cross burning. I don’t think Lee intends to make the point that we shouldn’t take these groups seriously, but the thrust of the picture does convey that very notion. In terms of the narrative, these dimwits don’t seem capable of taking over a town, let alone a country. Yet in terms of messaging, Lee goes out of his way to make sure we see how these folks developed into the nativist and alt-right supporters that underwrite Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” ideology.

BlacKkKlansman’s mixed missives culminate in four concluding sequences: one truthful—Stallworth was ordered to discontinue his undercover operation and destroy the case files; two fictional—a final call between Stallworth and David Duke, and a sting that brings down the racist cop Landers; and one extra-textural—a sequence of contemporary footage from the 2017 Unite The Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, its aftermath, and President Trump’s comments equating the bad character of the white supremacists with that of the counter-protesters.  

While in reality Stallworth never revealed to David Duke that he had been easily conned by a black man pretending to be white, the final telephone scene between Stallworth and Duke works as a satisfying narrative embellishment, totally appropriate to the spirit of the book and the tone of these actual phone conversations. But the scene in which Stallworth, Dumas, and other officers trick the drunken Landers into bragging about assaulting and mistreating black people rings as utterly false and misguided. Again, we must ask, what is the intended message of this contrived event? That it’s easy to bring down racists cops who misuse their power? That the “good” police officers are all eager to help cleanse their ranks of bad apples? Perhaps it’s simply meant to illustrate what should happen to bad cops, but in the context of a true story, the moment comes off as a simplistic wish fulfillment that downplays one of the most serious issues in American society.

The film’s final sequence, a rapidly cut montage of 2017 Charlottesville footage, makes the point that the racist ideas of the KKK and other white supremacists groups are not only still with us today, but have grown in power, visibility, and effectiveness. Video footage of the real David Duke speaking at the Charlottesville march drives home the truth that these men and their poisonous propaganda have never gone away; they were merely relegated to dark corners of American society, and only temporarily. But rather than connecting Stallworth’s story to our current political situation, these video images, so immediate and fresh in our public collective consciousness, practically erase from our minds everything we’ve been watching for the previous two hours. Lee’s desire to provoke an immediate reaction subverts the potentially timeless and universal power of his movie.

The director’s urge to provoke instantaneous reactions is nothing new.  When Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy tells his radio listeners to “register to vote!” during the final shot of Do The Right Thing, Lee intended it, in part, as a call to black New Yorkers in 1989 to vote then-Mayor Ed Koch out of office. But that line resonated more broadly—and still resonates today—with its grander, timeless message about the power of voting in all elections as a way to change the system from within. Similarly, Lee’s use of the 1991 footage of police beating Rodney King in the opening credits of his period biopic Malcolm X, or his integrating the collective feelings of post-9/11 New Yorkers into his adaptation of David Benioff’s pre-9/11 novel The 25th Hour, incorporated up-to-the-moment material into pre-existing narratives to ignite an audience’s emotional connection to the themes and characters depicted onscreen.

The Charlottesville footage at the end of BlacKkKlansman strikes an immediate and emotional chord in viewers. The dramatic shift from the easygoing, feel-good nature of the first 125 minutes, to the cold, harsh reality of the last three minutes is intentionally jarring. I’m just not sure how effective it is at summing up the themes of this story. And when we consider all of the people of color murdered, harassed, and terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan in its centuries-long existence, this picture’s final image, moving as it is, feels inappropriate. It’s as if the filmmakers believe that the only way to make mainstream audiences care about the evils of white supremacists is to remind us that those folks sometimes kill white people, too.