BlacKkKlansman **** (2018, John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace) – Movie Review

BlacKkKlansman is provocative, powerful, damning, and real scary. Spike Lee is on best fighting form, making his 70s-set story relevant, delivered with a mastery of film-making skills.

Director Spike Lee’s 2018 BlacKkKlansman is provocative, powerful, damning, and real scary. Spike Lee is on best fighting form, making his Seventies-set story relevant in a contemporary attack on the current US government, and delivering it with a mastery of film-making skills.

The screenplay is based on the book by Ron Stallworth, who is extremely well played by John David Washington, and the other really outstanding performance comes from Adam Driver as his alter ego, the white Jewish Flip Zimmerman, who stands in for him in infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan.

In a big role, Topher Grace has the unenviable task of playing the Klan white supremacist leader David Duke, though he does it well. The 91-year-old Harry Belafonte’s dignified cameo as Jerome Turner is very welcome and honourable.

In the extraordinary, quite incredible story, Stallworth is a young Colorado African-American cop who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan over the phone, and talks Zimmerman into being his white surrogate, who becomes head of the local Klan group.

Lee has no trouble extending his movie to epic length of 135 minutes, keeping up the high level of interest throughout. It is riveting. And he adroitly mixes capering comedy with the essentially dark story he is telling, though the serious side of the film is by far the better half of it. Ultimately, the Ku Klux Klan is no laughing matter.

It is strong material, rated R for language throughout, including racial epithets, and for disturbing and violent material and some sexual references.

Spike Lee took home his first competitive Oscar, winning for best adapted screenplay.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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