Released to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the fascist rally in Charlottesville - during which a white supremacist rammed his car into counter-protesters, murdering one, and then Donald Trump made snivelling, sycophantic excuses for the neo-Nazis - the film, detailing the true story of a black cop infiltrating the KKK, leaves no question as to the parallels it draws between then and now, nor of whom it blames.
A number of Klan members make reference to the need to "make America great" again. During a scene where the protagonist derides as implausible the thought of a lying racist buffoon becoming president, Lee could only be more on the nose if he walked out from behind the camera and winked at the audience. And the ending of the film dissolves into real footage from Charlottesville, and Trump's cowardly response, with such force that it left me gasping back tears. BlacKkKlansman is not playing. It sees the problem, and it's making damn sure that you see it, too.
But it's an odd film. The subject matter is shocking, yet the storytelling itself is safe, even formulaic. John David Washington (son of Denzel) plays Ron Stallworth, an undercover cop who bags an invitation to the Colorado Springs chapter of the KKK, using fellow officer Adam Driver as his white stand-in during face-to-face meetings.
What follows are the plot beats of every cop movie you've ever seen. The outsider rookie having to earn his place in the department. The disapproving commanding officer. The tense first undercover meeting. The moment it seems like the subterfuge is blown. The distraction at the last moment. The one member of the gang who has his suspicions... And so on, right up to the neat yet expected climax.
There's a love interest, played with nerve and verve and strength and cool by Laura Harrier, but it's a depressingly traditional role, and she ends up with little to do. In a film so concerned with equality, it's a shame that there's not more parity between the male and female characters. Passing the Bechdel test would have been a good start.
So the main thrust of the script is familiar, deploying a successful but well-worn version of the Hollywood structure, even if Lee's energetic, playful direction, and the excellent performances, elevate the material.
Yet in a way it feels like this is the point. The comfortable plot is really only a delivery method for the film's message. Lee is raging, and he wants you to rage, too. The bright, cartoony world of BlacKkKlansman, where good guys are heroic and bad guys get their comeuppance, makes a number of stand-out, tonally different scenes all the more shocking for their incongruity. You enjoy the story, you settle in, and then Lee reminds you that, hey, black people have been being shot and burned and hanged and raped and mutilated and run the fuck over by obscene, white-man-driven muscle cars for as long as we all can remember, and the recent surge in popularity of the far-right is only the intrusion into quiet middle-class life of an ugliness that has never once disappeared for people of colour.
The film is an appeal to emotion, a piece of rhetoric, and it is unapologetic about that. It uses storytelling and filmmaking techniques to make you empathise with its characters, to care about them and hope they win out, and even as the fictional narrative sees them succeed, the real world, messy and complicated and terrifying, comes rushing in, mocking you for enjoying such an easy ride.
There's a black power speech that Stallworth attends early on where Lee films rapt black faces singled out in the spotlight, staring up contemplating the struggles each of them has faced for no reason other than that they were born black in a white America, and it's like a stinging slap to the audience, with the accompanying shock of tears.
Later on Harry Belafonte has a cameo as an ageing civil rights activist who relates the true life story of the lynching of Jesse Washington, horrifying, repugnant, and he's as good as talking directly to us. He discusses social feelings of the time, the release of The Birth of a Nation, holds up real photographs of the crime. Once again we're skewered in our seats, given zero room to wiggle free. We were in the safety of a predictable story, but suddenly this is all too real.
And then there is the ending, and the final documentary footage, and all the neatness of what has come before is upended, and we are left paralysed, shocked, and broken.
In BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee uses the main weave of the film - solid and structurally sound and, yes, hilarious - to lay a comforting blanket for us to rest upon, and then he yanks it out from under us. "Liked these people, did you?" he asks. "Well this is what America has in store for them."
And the credits play, and you walk out of the cinema blinking in the late afternoon sun, and you feel sick, you feel dizzy. But most of all, you feel angry.
Excellent review, Rob. I had this down as one to watch. But now, it's a definite.
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