BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee’s 2018 film deliberately runs comedy and dread through the same scenes. The phone calls with David Duke are funny, the undercover meetings are genuinely frightening, and which register a viewer locks onto changes the whole picture. The opening signals as much: this is a film about how cinema manufactures racism, which makes its own genre pleasures suspect by design. The other decision is the ending. The film cuts out of 1970s drama into real footage from Charlottesville in 2017. That is an argument rather than an epilogue, and it retroactively reframes everything you laughed at. The American release date was chosen to fall on the first anniversary of that rally. The liberties taken are not small. In Ron Stallworth’s memoir his white counterpart was not Jewish; screenwriters Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz invented Flip Zimmerman, and Lee kept the change because Jews sit second on the Klan’s list of targets and it made the undercover scenes more dramatic. No bombing actually occurred, and the character of Patrice is entirely fictional. Harry Belafonte’s scene is his final film performance. A good fit if you want to watch knowing exactly where the true story stops. Less so if a police officer built as the hero of the fight against racism is something you cannot accept.