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"America First" - campaign slogan of Donald Trump, 45th and current President of the United States.
When white supremacists marched through the city of Charlottesville, Virginia carrying swastikas and Confederate flags (and resulting in the death of 32 year old local Heather Heyer) just over a year ago Donald Trump, instead of condemning unconditionally the fascists and terrorists who had arrived in the town ostensibly to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee, instead described some of them as "very fine people". A comment that, quite correctly, aroused much anger among those who thought America was supposed to stand for equality and fairness and was supposed to condemn terrorism, not support it explicitly.
It's against this backdrop that Spike Lee's new 'joint', BlacKkKlansman arrives. Although the film is set in 1979 the parallels between then and now are as blatant and obvious as a racist in the Oval Office. If it seems like the film's references to 'America First' and 'Make America Great Again' are overegging this powerful and potent pudding then they're really not. With a thousand or so extreme right wingers marching through Charlottesville, the Grand Wizard David Duke enjoying a higher profile than he has in years, and an estimated 8,000 KKK members active now in the US this really isn't the time to tickle racists out of being racist. If you don't walk out of this film feeling sad, angry, and yet hugely energised and wanting to punch the nearest Nazi you're probably part of the problem.
Ron Stallworth was, in real life, the first African-American police officer in Colorado Springs. Joining the force in the late seventies this articulate, likeable, yet still streetwise (check the afro) rookie soon moved from the drudgery and racial humiliation of the records department to become a detective assigned to wear a wire and go undercover at a talk by prominent Civil Rights campaigner, and black power advocate, Stokely Carmichael who, by then, had changed his name to Kwame Ture to celebrate his African roots as well as marking the inauguration of the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and Ahmed Sekou Toure, who fulfilled the same role in Guinea.
There Ron (played in the film by John David Washington, Denzel's son) meets the president of the student union at Colorado College, Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier). Dumas is every bit Stallworth's equal both in idealism and intelligence and if we're talking hairstyles her 'fro puts his to shame. They appear to be falling in love but it seems uncertain if this is merely Stallworth taking his work to the next level. Equally, has Stallworth fallen under the spell of the immensely powerful Ture (Corey Hawkins).
Ron's torn between his job and his conscience and he tries to circle that square by taking it upon himself to embark on a far more dangerous, though far more beneficial to society, venture. He decides to take on the Ku Klux Klan - by becoming a member.
If this was fiction you'd have trouble believing it happened but this is, for the most part, a true story. Stallworth rings up his local chapter of the KKK, says some racist stuff down the phone to them, and agrees to meet up with the chapter's president Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold). To get round the glaringly obvious problem Stallworth gets his colleague Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver, he of Lincoln, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Frances Ha) to go to the rendez vouz in his place. Stallworth will be Stallworth on the phone but Zimmerman will be Stallworth during face to face meetings.
This unlikely premise leads, of course, to all manner of tension. Will Breachway twig he's being played? Will his sidekick, the unhinged anti-semitic gun nut Felix Kendrickson (Jasper Paakkonen), expose Flip's Jewishness? Will Ivanhoe, a drunken chump played by Paul Walter Hauser in a role none too dissimilar to the one he played in the recent I, Tonya, accidentally blow them all up?
When Stallworth connects with David Duke, the Grand Wizard himself is played by Topher Grace, the tension ramps up further and by the time Stallworth is appointed, in his role as an everyday cop, to be Duke's security detail during a visit to Colorado Springs we're coiled as tight as springs. It's one of many set pieces in the film that are masterfully handled by an expert, and experienced, director. There's also humour in some scenes but we rein ourselves in after each burst of laughter as we realise this, more or less, actually happened, and, most chilling of all, nothing has really changed and, right now, we're starting to head backwards.
If it wasn't for the current political shitstorm this would still work as a great thriller. Washington, Driver, Harrier, Grace, Eggold, and Paakkonen all deliver brilliant performances as do Ashlie Atkinson as Felix's simple, but eager to please, racist wife Connie, and Frederick Weller as dumb, sexually abusive, and equally racist cop Landers (there's a slight touch of Sam Rockwell's Dixon from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri about him but this is a much more serious, and a much better, film).
There are cameos from Alec Baldwin as fictional white supremacist academician Dr. Kennebrew Beaureguard, Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Clay Davis in The Wire, shiiiiiiiiiiiiit), and, most powerfully of all, the 91 year old Harry Belafonte whose now frail voice adds a dignity to his role as Jerome Turner. He tells the story of his childhood friend, Jesse Washington, who was accused of raping and murdering a girl in Waco, Texas before being tried by a kangaroo court, lynched, beaten, castrated, and having his fingers pulled off and sold as macabre souvenirs to the braying crowds that attended the lynching. Many of them, as was the case with these regular events, bringing picnics to enjoy the day.
As Belafonte/Turner speaks he's surrounded by actual photographs of Washington's charred corpse and the footage is interspersed with Klan members being inducted into 'the organisation' (the invisible empire must never be referred to as the Klan or the KKK by its members) by Duke before watching a screening of D.W.Griffiths' The Birth of a Nation, the highly controversial 1915 silent film that was responsible for rejuvenating the KKK and thus directly leading to the murder of African-Americans. How many we'll never know. The Klan didn't release data and the police mostly left them to it.
It's a neat trick by Spike Lee to use some of the revolutionary film making techniques pioneered by Griffiths in The Birth of a Nation, crosscutting, tracking shots, to tell a story that aims to redress the balance, to take back power, and to create equality instead of division. BlacKkKlansman also begins with shots of the civil war dead from 1939's Gone With The Wind, another film with problematic portrayals of its black characters.
Lee doesn't just delve into cinema history but employs a soundtrack worthy of a blaxploitation movie or an episode of Soul Train (James Brown, The Temptations, The Cornelius Brothers, even Prince appears) to help tell a story that underpins his assertion, made in a Q&A beamed in live from the BFI Southbank after the screening, that a nation built on dispossessing, and killing, the native population before abducting people from Africa and forcing them into slavery to work the land for the benefit of the white invaders needs to come to terms with its true story and not adhere to ludicrous and false creation myths propagated by Trump and his cronies and defended to the death by the NRA to the degree that the deaths of its own citizens, and its own children, is now considered mere collateral damage in the war against truth. The United States own Declaration of Independence decrees that 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness' are three 'unalienable rights'. Yet some, many, still think all that Second Amendment shit about bearing arms is more important.
The Q&A, or at least Spike's contribution to it, shone further light on the hot topics raised by the film. Spike spoke about how the film came his way on the recommendation of Jordan Peele (Get Out), how international audiences should not think this is a uniquely American problem (he cited Brexit as an example of this and in Boris Johnson's use of the word 'pickaninny' (one of many favoured racial slurs used by the Klan) and his meetings with extreme right wing agitator Steve Bannon we're beginning to see just how clear these parallels are), and how white power, extreme right wing, actions that result in people dying should not be labelled violence but terrorism because these people, not just the KKK of the 1970s but also the driver of the car in Charlottesville that killed Heather Heyer, are terrorists, but he also spoke of how he wanted to make a big exciting, politically expedient, feature film like Chinatown, Dog Day Afternoon, or Serpico. He's certainly succeeded in that.
Ten years ago BlacKkKlansman would've seemed like a missive from a dim and distant past but in 2018 it felt terrifyingly topical. I thought I'd admire the film and I did. I wasn't sure if I'd love it. I did that too. I exhort you to go and see it and to see it now. Before it's too late.
Thanks to Pam, Sarah, and, especially, Gary for joining me for this brilliant, and important, film. "Very fine people".
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