BlacKkKlansman

BLACKKKLANSMAN   **1/2

Spike Lee

2018

IDEA:  Ron Stallworth, the first black member of the Colorado Springs police force, and Flip Zimmerman, a Jewish officer, infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

BLURB:  The opening of BlacKkKlansman, a direct-address white supremacist lecture intercut with footage from Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation, packs a wallop. It instantly establishes Lee’s film as a rebuke of and corrective to a history of racist popular American cinema, auguring an indignant work of agitprop that will make no bones about condemning the country’s virulent systemic racism. Lee’s outrageous true-story subject matter offers an incendiary way into targeting the white nationalist ideology that has become increasingly mainstreamed in the nation’s political discourse. So why is BlacKkKlansman such a missed opportunity? Why does Lee, outside of some characteristically fiery, rhetorically blunt montage, seem so content pandering to his audience instead of shaking them up? There is little about his film that should be illuminating to anyone not immured in the myth of a post-racial America. There is equally little that should inspire any new thought. What are we to do with endless scenes wringing humor and horror from the KKK’s buffoonish moral degeneracy? Lee redundantly airs their epithet-laden rhetoric and mostly has us pat ourselves on the back for recognizing its insanity, a lazy tactic that takes up too much of the film’s bloated runtime. BlacKkKlansman is a vital work by virtue of its context, but what really should have been challenging, excoriating subversion settles for the fleetingly cathartic.