Review of BlacKkKlansman, directed by Spike Lee

When a new month rolled around, I was delighted to open Netflix for the first time in a while and see that a bunch of Black filmmakers had been added to the selections for the month. I’ve been on such a movie kick as of late, which is why my blog has been more revived than it usually is.

I love watching movies, but I know this phase is going to end quite shortly, so I’m enjoying it while it lasts. I might have to get a full-time job soon once I’m finishing up graduate school, so there’s plenty to knock out on my to-do and bucket list before then.

So this is how I ended up watching BlacKkKlansman, which is a movie that I’ve always kind of read about, but never had the time or opportunity to watch.

A Black cop joins a sting operation to take down the Ku Klux Klan.

The protagonist is this movie is a real one—in 1972, Ron Stallworth was hired as the Colorado Springs Police Department.

For those who might not know much about the area as a whole, it’s still to this day has its pockets that lean extremely conservative, making it a less than ideal place in certain parts if you’re Black.

Anyways, Ron gets the job and is assigned to the records room, where he is bullied and has encounters with a fellow officer that’s blatantly racist.

Ron decides to apply to be an undercover officer, and his first gig on the job is to attend the rally of leader Kwame Ture because he’s Black and can fit right in.

Fitted with a microphone, he wanders into the rally and chats with the president of the Black Student Union at the local college, Patrice. The two hit it off, but later in the night, the aggressive police officer stops Patrice and Kwame, threatening him and groping her in the process.

Stallworth is taken into the intelligence division after working at the rally. He decides to hit up the local KKK chapter as his next big job, calling their number and pretending to be white.

After speaking to the president of the local chapter, Walter, he realizes he gave them his full name and agreed to meet with them. Enter: his Jewish coworker Flip. He recruits Flip to go in his stead, and Flip meets the KKK members at their home.

Two of them just seem like standard KKK members, but one, Felix, seems to be more radical. They’re also implying a terrorist attack is coming up, which is concerning to know about.

So Flip keeps going to the KKK meetings while Ron chats to the Grand Wizard over the phone. Ron begins dating Patrice in the meantime, but she knows nothing about him working as a cop—which she would definitely not approve of.

This double operation starts to become threatened when Felix thinks of Flip as Jewish and wants to force him, threatening him with a gun, to take a polygraph test. Ron foils that plan by throwing a rock into the kitchen window.

Ron begins passing on their information to the army, and the FB informs him that this is very useful information as KKK members are a part of big teams on the federal level.

The Grand Wizard visits Colorado Springs, Flip has to be initiated into the KKK because of it, and Ron pretends to be a bodyguard assigned from the cops to the Grand Wizard.

The maker of the bomb recognizes Flip as a cop, tells Felix, and they end up leaving the KKK event. At the same time, one of the wives of the KKK members plants a bomb at a civil rights rally, Ron catches her, and she puts it under Patrice’s car instead.

As he tackles her, the cops come after him because they think he’s a Black man attacking a white woman, and the three KKK members who Flip meant originally are killed in the blast after they come to the crime scene.

Patrice and Ron make up after she realizes he’s a cop, they bust the racist, aggressive cop while wearing a wire. The movie ends with the two of them together, looking out the window, and seeing a burning cross outside. Footage of the Unite the Right rally and the murder that occurred then wraps up this film.

Overall Thoughts

Fun fact: this was my first Spike Lee movie. Considering how long I’ve been seriously watching movies, it’s shocking how I never got to watching Spike until now.

He’s truly a classic filmmaker at this point. But anyways, this was such a great movie to watch. The technical elements, the script, and the acting were all nailed down really well, making it such a fun cinematic experience throughout.

I think I’m going to be binge watching the rest of Spike’s movies for the rest of the year, that’s for sure.

There’s also such big irony in the fact that Adam Driver was the only one nominated in the acting category—of course the white man is the only one (great performance, but an ironic series of events to me).

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