FILM: BlacKkKlansman

BlacKkKlansman is the horrifying and riveting story of audacious rookie cop Ron Stallworth, the first black cop in the Colorado Springs Police Department in the 1970s, and his stunning infiltration of the Klu Klux Klan, with the help of a Jewish partner. The film is all the more impactful for being, as the film itself declares in an opening title, “based on some fo’ real, fo’ real shit.” The story initially touches on his challenges being the first black cop in the police department, and being assigned to go under cover at black nationalist rallies. The film nicely captures the 1970s era and its racial dynamics. Though the film has a period feel, the dynamics are uncomfortably familiar. Stallworth’s “double consciousness” about being a black cop becomes even more fraught when he starts dating the president of the local college black students organization. But the film really gets intense when Stallworth starts to infiltrate the KKK, posing on the phone as a racist who wants to join them, but forgetting to use an alias instead of his real name. When the local Klansmen want to meet him in person, he has to recruit a colleague to pose as the “white racist Ron Stallworth”. The two “Ron Stallworths” work hard to keep their stories straight, but the wheels come dangerously close to coming off the rails. It doesn’t help that the white colleague also happens to be Jewish, and if the KKK hate anyone as much as the blacks, it’s the Jews. When the grand wizard David Duke himself (uncannily portrayed by Topher Grace) comes into town to preside over Ron’s Klan initiation ceremony at the same time as the black student organization is hosting a revered civil rights icon (and creating a tempting terrorism target for the Klansmen), the intensity and suspense in this film go to 11. Here director Spike Lee has created a masterful extended sequence of the two mindbogglingly concurrent but dissonant scenes – the Klan ceremony and the civil rights leader’s speech – sometimes cutting back and forth and sometimes showing both split-screen. It fires on multiple levels at once, with the dissonance of the two diametric views of national justice compounding on the double procedural suspense of the terror plot and the undercover operation ready to unravel at any moment. I was breathless. The denouement is equally brilliant, managing to be both profoundly satisfying and provocatively jarring. Just when you might be tempted to feel a comfortable distance from another era when times were different, Spike Lee throws ice cold water in your face, saying “that was then, but that is also now.”