“Today’s young generation, they don’t know anything,” says Spike Lee in the Oscar-winning Rumble in the Jungle documentary, When We Were Kings. “Something happened last year, they know nothing about it. There are these great, great stories. These great historic events. I’m not talking about 1850s stuff. They don’t know who Malcolm X is. They don’t know who JFK is. They don’t know Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson. You can go down the line. It’s scary.”
You could interpret Lee’s career, in part, as an exercise in filling those holes in America’s collective memory. Malcolm X is probably the most famous example, with his 1992 film reigniting a debate about the black political leader and his legacy. His documentary 4 Little Girls told the story of the Birmingham church bombing with its eerie parallels to the Charleston church shooting. But even She Hate Me – ostensibly an ethically questionable film about sperm donation – had a section dedicated to the story of Frank Wills, the security guard who raised the alarm about the Watergate break-in, struggled to find work after (he believed he was blacklisted) and who died in extreme poverty in 2000 at the age of 52.
BlacKkKlansman fits into that continuum with its true-ish interpretation of Ron Stallworth’s time as an undercover cop – and its potent mix of historical fact and fiction, style, swagger and unpicking of current political ideology means its the obvious choice for this year’s best picture Oscar. Lee took inspiration from The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, and for a director whose greatest work has never been acknowledged by the Academy, there would be something fitting in him finally getting recognition for a work that is simultaneously iconoclastic, more racially charged than ever and rooted in the very best of 70s cinema.
Yes, Boots Riley has a valid point that the true story of Ron Stallworth was very different to the one that Lee presents. But the counter argument is that a film which is presented as being “based upon some fo’ real, fo’ real shit” should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt. And, anyway, the film’s best moments all mix reality and fiction to glorious effect. There’s Lee’s presentation of civil rights activist Kwame Ture, who Stallworth really did meet and who is played by a career-best Corey Hawkins. There’s the masterstroke of using Harry Belafonte to appear as Jerome Turner, a made-up character who tells the Colorado students about the very real lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, is one of Lee’s very best and is an important piece of storytelling that lingers long after the credits roll. Then there’s the film’s coup de theatre: the interspersing of real-life footage of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally, a joyous David Duke and Donald Trump’s conflation of anti-fascist protests with the far right groups that swamped the town.
The sombre takeaway is that amid this often laugh-out-loud comedy is a reminder that the war against the far right hasn’t been won. As incompetent and ridiculous as the Klan and Duke are in BlacKkKlansman, the ideas they espouse are now – at least in part – influencing the leader of the free world and his inner circle. It is a vindication of Lee, whose constant drum-beat warnings about America’s racist inclinations were critiqued as outmoded under Obama, but now now sound like a sobering case of I Told You So.
“The way he fused politics and sports, very few black athletes have talked the way Muhammad Ali talked, without fear of something happening to their career,” says Lee in When We Were Kings, issuing a statement that could be applied to the fragility of his own career in a Hollywood that hasn’t always appreciated him. “These kids today will be missing a whole lot if they don’t know about the legacy of Muhammad Ali. Because no matter what era you live in you see very few true heroes.”
The Academy would be missing out if they failed to acknowledge the Brooklyn director yet again. He’s not only delivered a timely lesson in how history repeats, but he’s also shown why he’s one of the few true cinematic heroes operating today.
