Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKkKlansman’ Is A Witty Comedy That Doesn’t Punch As Hard As Expected [Cannes Review]

So a black cop and a Jewish cop walk into a Klan meeting… The only thing the set-up for Spike Lee‘s latest joint is missing is an Irishman, for it to be the kind of joke your embarrassing great-uncle might tell after a few too many whiskies, just before he goes off on one about feminism that has “gone too far” and the latest Facebook chemtrail theories. But though the premise of “BlacKkKlansman” might be outlandish, it is based in fact, or rather on “some fo’ real fo’ real shit” as the intro tells us, in that bouncy Lee-esque vernacular that, for the generation electrified by “Do the Right Thing” always feels like a greeting from an old friend.

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In the unlikely environs of Colorado Springs in the 1970s, the police department’s first black officer, Ron Stallworth (played here by John David Washington, whose dad is some guy called Denzel), did indeed team up with a white undercover agent (here played by the invaluable Adam Driver) to infiltrate and undermine their local Klan chapter. But while that outline seems primed to yield a mismatched interracial buddy movie, Lee’s oblique angle, which emphasises the Jewishness of Driver’s gorgeously named Flip Zimmerman, makes it so much more than a ’70s take on “Lethal Weapon” (and not just because the role of Flip would be an unlikely fit for Mel Gibson).

This is a film that begins with a virulently racist, frequently flubbed presentation by a choleric white supremacist played by Alec Baldwin as a mash-up between his ‘SNL’ Trump impression and that scene in “30 Rock” where Jack Donaghy needs to appear on camera and can’t work out what to do with his hands. And it ends, in a nod to Lee’s “Malcolm X” which featured anachronistic footage of the Rodney King beating, with a montage of Black Lives Matter-related newsreel footage, including the Charlottesville protests and Trump’s now-infamous “very fine people” speech. So it is a deeply unsubtle broadside on contemporary race issues, of course, giving whose joint we’re toking on, in which Trumpian slogans about reclaiming America’s lost greatness are put into the mouths of characters from half a century ago.

But it also features something a little new from Lee: an investigation into the commonality of the experience of oppression between oppressed groups, in which the most soulful monologue on the repudiation and reclamation of racial identity and the phenomenon of “passing” is delivered not by Ron, but by Flip in relation to his Jewish heritage. Ron and Flip essentially create an amalgam identity, who looks like Flip but sounds like Ron (with Washington using a subtle but uncannily accurate and always funny vocal shift to “sound white” when talking on the phone), and this “Ron Stallworth,” this white, African-American, Jewish hybrid version, who is also a cop masquerading as a civilian, and a moral person masquerading as a Klan sympathizer, is such a powerful combination of signifiers that it’s a little surprising, and disappointing, that Lee doesn’t capitalize on him more.

“BlacKkKlansman” has many virtues, but it is also a strange kind of messy, in which the performances from both Washington and Driver are so laid back as to feel curiously low-energy at times. “Ron’s” interactions with his local Klan rednecks (played by Jasper Pääkkönen, Paul Walter Hauser, Ryan Eggold as caricatures, and quite rightly because idiots like the KKK renounce the right to dimensionality when they stick on that hood) mostly register as mild, (gefilte) fish-out-of-water comedy, which is amusing but it does rob the film of any actual sense of peril or contingency. And aside from a well-cast Topher Grace playing wheedling white-power weakling David Duke, the supporting characters are sketched in. Even Patrice, the empowered and politicized Black Student Union president for whom Ron falls, is underwritten, though she’s very attractively played by Laura Harrier, and styled to envy-inducing perfection in a glorious afro and smart-girl glasses.

There’s a Brechtian element here in which many of Lee’s choices call attention to themselves for their artificiality, appropriate given he’s almost as interested in cinematic responses to racism as in racism itself, using clips and posters from blaxploitation movies, Griffiths’ “The Birth Of A Nation” and “Gone With The Wind.” But even in the “proper” story of the film, there’s a theatricality at work, which, because it’s not as conceptually coherent as in his wild and wonderful “Chi-Raq,” means we’re jerked in and out of suspension of disbelief.

The relationship between Ron and Flip feels modern (partly due to Driver’s diffident underplaying, and Washington’s air of watchful remove) and Lee is remarkably generous toward all the other non-Klan white characters. Aside from one racist bad seed who eventually gets his comeuppance, Ron’s white colleagues and superiors (played by Robert Patrick Burke, Michael Buscemi and Ken Garito) are a lot more supportive and enlightened than you would imagine a gang of 1970s Colorado cops would have been, in their dealings with the first black officer in their unit. Even the styling, afros aside, keeps more overt ’70s cues to a minimum.

The result, almost certainly intentional, is that even without the contemporary footage, you are never in any doubt that you are watching a 2018 movie that is less interested in the past for its own sake than for what it can tell us about our current American moment. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that anyone hoping for a smoother, more dramatically immersive experience won’t find one here, while those of us who love Lee best when he punches hardest might be a little disappointed that the restrained pace and relaxed comedy keep the trashcans largely on the sidewalk, and the windows largely unsmashed. [B]

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