Bookended by a brace of harrowing scenes which beg the question “how far have we come?” – a white woman in a straw hat in the shape of Scarlett O’Hara searching for a doctor among a field of wounded Confederates, juxtaposed by real-life footage of a Unite the Right rally which exploded into the Charlottesville riots after a white supremacist ploughed a car into a crowd of counter-protesters killing one (Heather Heyer, to whom the film is dedicated) and injuring 19 – director and co-writer Spike Lee’s satirical adaptation of Ron Stallworth’s memoir about the first black detective in the Colorado Springs police department who after responding to a newspaper ad to join the KKK “whites-up” to “infiltrate hate” (the film’s tagline), the answer is “far, but not far enough”.

John David Washington (son of Denzel) plays the ambitious lead who is headhunted to become the “Jackie Robinson” of the CSPD which, like the local community and wider society, is populated by what Hilary Clinton would call a “basket of deplorables”. King of the knuckle-draggers being Frederick Weller’s racist cop Andy Landers who sexually harasses the president of the black student union Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier) after a speech by the radical civil rights leader Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins). The gist of which is that “it is time for you to stop running away from being black” to “define beauty for black people” and, controversially, to call a spade a spade – Tarzan is Hitler in loincloth in that he beat the “black savages” of the jungle in the same ruthless and discriminatory manner as the Nazis targeted the Jews.

Speaking of which, with his Jewish with a small “j” co-worker Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) stepping into Ron’s boots to meet, first, a group of local Klansmen headed by the personable Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold) and putrid Felix Kendrickson (Jasper Pääkkönen), and, second, the Grand Wizard of The Organisation himself David Duke (Topher Grace) who makes a chilling real-life appearance in the Charlottesville riots footage, Stallworth closes in on a terrorist plot to kill Patrice after she refuses to let sleeping dogs lie in the media. And in so doing gets a glimpse into the inner workings of the secret organisation which aims to stop America from becoming a “mongrel nation” so that it can “achieve its greatness again”.

Sound familiar? Of course it does, and deliberately so. With Trump’s “bigly” echoed in the English-ish “doing gooder” by Paul Walter Hauser’s bovine Beavis to Jasper Pääkkönen’s redneck Butthead. And the opening outtakes of a right-wing speech by Alec Baldwin’s vitriolic Dr Kennebrew Beauregard who bemoans “the spread of integration” under the “Martin Luther Coons of this world”. But perhaps the biggest LOL moment comes when a black hotel worker at a white supremacist meeting remarks under his breath: Ain’t this a bitch! If I had known this was a Ku Klux Klan convention I wouldn’t have taken this mother f***ing job!

The most memorable scene, however, is devoid of laughter and involves the juxtaposition of a KKK initiation ceremony with a harrowing real-life tale about the lynching of an innocent black teenager Jesse Washington as narrated by a family friend and aged civil rights activist Jerome Turner played with grace, intelligence and restraint by the legendary Harry Belafonte. To paraphrase Dylan, the times they have a-changed. But with Trump sewing the seeds of “build the wall” division and black people being “shot down like dogs in the street by white racist cops”, there’s a “battle outside / And it is ragin’.”

Director: Spike Lee

Writers: Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz

Stars: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier

Peter Callaghan
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