Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman opens with a lie told in a bad suit. Alec Baldwin, playing the race-baiting Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard, sweats through a filmed appeal to white America, stumbling over slurs he can barely pronounce. It is a fake documentary, a piece of staged propaganda, and Lee means for you to catch the seams. Everything that follows in BlacKkKlansman runs on the same trick: a man pretending to be something he is not, selling the performance well enough to be believed.
The film is a 2018 American biographical crime film, directed by Lee, who co-wrote the screenplay with Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, and Kevin Willmott. It runs 136 minutes. It is loosely based on the 2014 memoir Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth, the first African-American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department. The tagline is blunt: “Infiltrate hate.”
Trailer, via Focus Features.
Ron Stallworth and the Records Room
John David Washington plays Stallworth. The film puts him in Colorado Springs in the late 1970s, hired as the first black officer in the department. He is assigned to the records room. He tires of being bullied and applies to work undercover.
That decision starts the machine. Stallworth is sent to infiltrate a local rally where Kwame Ture, also known as Stokely Carmichael, is speaking. Corey Hawkins plays Ture. At the rally Stallworth meets Patrice Dumas, president of the Black Student Union at Colorado College, played by Laura Harrier.
The rally also introduces the film’s ugliest piece of business. While Stallworth drives Ture to his hotel, Patrice is stopped by patrolman Andy Landers, a racist officer in Stallworth’s own precinct. Landers threatens Ture and gropes Patrice. It is a short scene, and it does more work than any speech in the film. The danger to these characters does not arrive from the Klan alone. It wears the same uniform Stallworth wears.
A Phone Call to Walter Breachway
Reassigned to the intelligence division, Stallworth reads about a local division of the Ku Klux Klan in the newspaper. He calls the chapter posing as a white man. He speaks with Walter Breachway, the chapter president, played by Ryan Eggold.
Then he makes a mistake that turns into the plot. He uses his real name. Now he has to show up in person. So he recruits Flip Zimmerman, his Jewish coworker at the precinct, to be the body that walks into the room while Stallworth stays the voice on the phone. Adam Driver plays Zimmerman.
This is the engine of BlacKkKlansman, and it is a good one. Two men split one identity. Stallworth handles the sound. Zimmerman handles the skin. Neither can do the job without the other, and both are lying about who they are in a city that would punish them for it.
Felix Kendrickson, Ivanhoe, and the Wire
Under Stallworth’s name, Zimmerman meets Walter. He also meets Felix Kendrickson, played by Jasper Pääkkönen, who is more reckless and more unstable than Walter, and later Felix’s wife Connie. Paul Walter Hauser plays Ivanhoe, who cryptically refers to an upcoming terrorist attack.
Stallworth calls Klan headquarters in Louisiana to speed up his membership. That call begins a run of phone conversations with Grand Wizard David Duke, played by Topher Grace. Grace plays Duke as a man who has polished his hate into something presentable, and the film’s contempt for him is total.
Then Felix starts to suspect Zimmerman of being Jewish. He tries to force him to take a polygraph test at gunpoint. Stallworth is listening on the wire Zimmerman is wearing. He breaks the Kendricksons’ kitchen window as a distraction. It is the best sequence in the film, and it works because the film has already told you the stakes.
Patrice Dumas and What Stallworth Withholds
Stallworth begins dating Patrice. He does not tell her that he is a police officer. That omission sits in the middle of the film like a stone.
Harrier’s Patrice is not a decoration. She is the president of the Black Student Union at Colorado College, and she is the one character in BlacKkKlansman who has already decided where she stands. Stallworth spends the film managing what he reveals. She spends it asking why he will not commit.
The film is honest about the cost of that. Stallworth can pass on the phone. Zimmerman can pass in the chapter meeting. Patrice cannot pass anywhere, and she knows it.
Harry Belafonte’s Last Performance
The cast also includes Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Mr. Turrentine, Robert John Burke as Chief Bridges, and Brian Tarantina as Officer Clay Mulaney. Harry Belafonte appears as well. It was his last performance before his death in April 2023, and the film carries that weight without leaning on it.
Lee produced BlacKkKlansman with Raymond Mansfield, Shaun Redick, Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, and Jordan Peele. Andy Frances, Stallworth’s manager, packaged it. QC Entertainment bought the film rights to the book in 2015. Lee signed on as director in September 2017. Much of the cast joined the following month, and filming began in New York State.
The film premiered on May 14, 2018, at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix. Focus Features released it in the United States on August 10, 2018, with Universal Pictures handling other territories. It drew critical acclaim, with praise for Lee’s direction, the performances of Washington and Driver in particular, and its timely themes. Critics called it a return to form for Lee. It received six nominations at the 91st Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won for Best Adapted Screenplay.
The Two Men, Side by Side
The film’s central device is a split. It is worth setting the two halves next to each other, because the comparison is the whole movie.
| Ron Stallworth | Flip Zimmerman | |
|---|---|---|
| Actor | John David Washington | Adam Driver |
| Role in the operation | The voice on the phone | The body in the room |
| Identity he performs | A white man | A man named Ron Stallworth |
| What he is hiding | That he is a police officer, from Patrice | That he is Jewish |
| Where the risk lands | The wire, the window, the lie at home | The polygraph at gunpoint |
Read that table and you have the film’s argument. Stallworth and Zimmerman are running the same con from two directions, and the danger is not shared evenly. Zimmerman’s risk is physical and immediate. Stallworth’s risk is moral, and it has a name: Patrice.
What BlacKkKlansman Gets Right
BlacKkKlansman is not a subtle film and does not want to be. Lee stages the Klan as a group of small, ridiculous men, and then refuses to let you laugh them off. Ivanhoe’s cryptic reference to an upcoming terrorist attack is the hinge. The film keeps telling you these people are clowns, and keeps reminding you that clowns with a plan are still a plan.
Washington carries the phone scenes with his voice alone, which is harder than it sounds. He has to be white on the line and black in the room, and the film never lets him relax into either. Driver gets the more obviously actorly assignment, the man in the room with his face doing the work, and he takes it without overselling it. The polygraph scene is the proof.
The supporting cast is doing specific jobs. Topher Grace’s David Duke is the film’s most useful villain because he is the most polite. Pääkkönen’s Felix is the one who will actually hurt someone. Hauser’s Ivanhoe is the one who tells you what is coming. That division of labor is clean, and Lee uses it.
The weaknesses are real. The film is 136 minutes and it feels it in the middle, where the undercover operation repeats its beats. Patrice’s storyline is the most interesting thing in the movie and gets the least room. And the film’s closing turn toward real footage lands hard, but it also does work the film has not quite earned on its own.
None of that sinks it. BlacKkKlansman is a crime film, a comedy, a drama, and a history lesson, and it holds all four without dropping one. It is loosely based on Stallworth’s memoir, and the looseness matters. This is Lee’s version of the story, not a transcript.
The Verdict
BlacKkKlansman earns its reputation. The premise sounds like a stunt, and the film treats it as anything but. Two men, one name, one wire, and a city that would ruin both of them for trying. Lee’s direction is confident, the screenplay is sharp, and the performances at the center are the reason it holds together.
The film’s best idea is that passing is not a trick, it is a tax. Stallworth pays it on the phone. Zimmerman pays it in the room. Patrice pays it every day, for free, and gets nothing back.
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