BlacKkKlansman is filled with Confederate flags. The stars and bars are seen in a clip from Gone with the Wind and show up in neon on the wall of a redneck pool hall and framed on the wall of David Duke’s office. The cultural legacy of the Ku Klux Klan and the symbol it adopted is the theme of Spike Lee’s latest film. It’s present in the recurring clips from The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film that extolled the Klan as Reconstruction-era heroes and triggered the reemergence of the defunct terrorist group. The Klan is at the heart of BlacKkKlansman’s unlikely seeming tale except that it was drawn from the memoir of an African American police officer, Ron Stallworth, who responded to a white supremacist recruiting ad in a Colorado Springs, Colo., newspaper and initiated an elaborate plan to infiltrate the local chapter.
In the early ’70s, Ron (John David Washington) becomes the first black officer in Colorado Springs. As the gruff police chief (Robert John Burke) warns, he will have a hard time with some of the boys in the force. But the chief, a fair-minded lawman according to his own lights, takes a chance on Ron as a detective. His first assignment: infiltrate a rally by Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael aka Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins), whom the chief suspects of stirring up the “good black people.” Wearing a wire, Ron records a firebrand speech denouncing the murder of blacks by racist cops and condemning the racism inherent in Hollywood portrayals of blacks. Ron also falls for the rally’s militant organizer, Patrice (Laura Harrier). She hates the “pigs,” as she calls cops, and discounts the possibility that “black liberation” can be achieved within the system. He lies, telling her he works in construction.
Ron leads a double life several times over: as a black man in white America; as a man whose lover could consider him the enemy if she knew the truth; and as the voice on the line to the Klan. His infiltration of its Colorado Springs branch could not have occurred without the help of his fellow officer, Flip (Adam Driver), a Jew who gave no thought to his heritage until confronted by the Klan’s raging anti-Semitism. Pretending to be Ron, Flip attends meetings and gets to know the Klansmen face to face. He realizes that, like some African Americans, he has been “passing” as something he was not in white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America.
The humor in BlacKkKlansman is inherent in Ron’s playacting on the phone with the local Klansmen and their long-distance leader, the real-life David Duke, played to perfection by Topher Grace. In the ’70s, Duke sought to mainstream the Klan. In public he wore a necktie, not a hood; he called himself “national director,” not grand wizard. As one of his police colleagues explains to Ron, Duke’s goal is to mask racism beneath issues tailored to white middle-class anxiety over immigration, crime and taxes—and one day, someone like Duke will seize the White House. Ron shakes his head, doubting whether anyone like that could ever be president of the United States.
Lee has seldom been accused of subtlety and he makes his points with broad strokes in BlacKkKlansman. The movie’s postscript features footage from the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.; Trump’s notorious remarks afterward; and, yes, the real David Duke, addressing the Charlottesville rally and quoting Trump: “This is the first step toward taking America back.”
