BlacKkKlansman Review

Lee takes a story so improbable that it announces itself as true, and refuses to play it purely as farce. John David Washington gives Ron Stallworth a rookie's eagerness and a carefully borrowed telephone voice, while Adam Driver's Flip Zimmerman carries the quietest thread in the film, a secular Jewish cop discovering that the mask he wears inside the Klan hall is not one he can take off cleanly afterwards. The comic engine is real, and the chapter members are written as banal, petty and stupid rather than gothic.

Then Lee closes the trap. His intercut between Harry Belafonte recounting the lynching of Jesse Washington and an initiation audience delighting in The Birth of a Nation is the most rigorous montage in his late work, and the unannounced coda converts a period piece into an argument about now. Chayse Irvin shoots the 1970s in warm grain without nostalgia. The romance with Laura Harrier's Patrice is the thinnest strand, and the tonal swings are abrupt by design. We rate it the best film Lee has made since the 1990s.