BlacK­kKlans­man

Despite the vital steps tak­en by activist move­ments such as Black Lives Mat­ter in response to the per­sis­tent and increas­ing­ly pub­lic slaugh­ter of black peo­ple at the hands of pre­dom­i­nant­ly white police offi­cers, it took NFL quar­ter­back Col­in Kaeper­nick tak­ing a knee dur­ing the nation­al anthem to reignite the con­ver­sa­tion around police bru­tal­i­ty and racism in the US. It’s apt, then, that Spike Lee’s sen­sa­tion­al new film about a trail­blaz­ing black cop fea­tures an African-Amer­i­can for­mer foot­ball play­er in the lead role.

In BlacK­kKlans­man, John David Wash­ing­ton stars as detec­tive Ron Stall­worth, who ear­ly on in the film is described as the ​“Jack­ie Robin­son of police offi­cers”. Like the bound­ary-break­ing base­ball icon, Stall­worth crossed colour lines at a piv­otal time in America’s his­to­ry by becom­ing the first African-Amer­i­can offi­cer to serve in the Col­orado Springs Police Depart­ment. Togeth­er with his Jew­ish part­ner Flip Zim­mer­man (Adam Dri­ver), Stall­worth infil­trat­ed a local chap­ter of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1970s, even­tu­al­ly becom­ing its leader.

Before Stall­worth and Zim­mer­man set to work, Lee kicks things off in sear­ing fash­ion with what could eas­i­ly be mis­tak­en for a too-hot-for-TV SNL sketch – Alec Bald­win spew­ing re-and-brim­stone big­otry as a but­toned-down far-right extrem­ist. This is coun­ter­point­ed by a rous­ing speech at a meet­ing of black stu­dents and, lat­er, with con­tem­po­rary news­reel footage show­ing peace­ful protests marred by vio­lence, as well as pub­lic address­es giv­en by the likes of Don­ald Trump and David Duke.

The lat­ter white nation­al­ist is por­trayed in the film by Topher Grace, whose benign, almost boy­ish image alludes to the fact that racism comes in many guis­es, and that the great­est threat to lib­er­ty and social equal­i­ty are those who are will­ing to stoke and exploit people’s prej­u­dices for their own polit­i­cal gain.

There is romance and a great deal of humour in the film – at one point Grace’s Duke attempts to explain the dif­fer­ence between how a black man and a white man pro­nounce cer­tain words; anoth­er high­light sees the for­mer Grand Wiz­ard on the receiv­ing end of a racial epi­thet-strewn crank call.

In the film’s most poignant scene, the vet­er­an singer, screen actor and social activist Har­ry Bela­fonte recalls the hor­rif­ic sto­ry of Jesse Wash­ing­ton, a black teenage farm­hand who was lynched on the streets of Waco, Texas in 1916 as a bay­ing crowd watched. Else­where, clips from Gone with the Wind and DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation serve as pow­er­ful reminders of the long shad­ow cast by the Con­fed­er­ate flag, which Amer­i­ca has yet to step out of, in some quar­ters more than others.

Lee’s astute­ness both as a social com­men­ta­tor and a film­mak­er lies in his abil­i­ty to enter­tain while mak­ing you think. In BlacK­kKlans­man, he pays homage to var­i­ous blax­ploita­tion-era touch­stones as a means of cel­e­brat­ing black art and cul­ture, specif­i­cal­ly in the con­text of its emer­gence and evo­lu­tion as a form of resis­tance. He also states in no uncer­tain terms that Amer­i­ca has always been in the busi­ness of sell­ing hate. If in doing so Lee suc­ceeds in rais­ing a few laughs, it’s only because he speaks the inex­orable, painful truth.