BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Director Spike Lee's biggest box office hit since The Inside Man twelve years ago, BlacKkKlansman tells the true story of Colorado Springs police detective Ron Stallworth's infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970's, with the catch being that Stallworth is a black man. Colorado Springs first black officer and detective Stallworth, on a whim and in response to an ad in the paper, called up a local KKK recruiter and quickly convinces him that he might be a promising new recruit. Stallworth (John David Washington) made one big mistake however, he used his real name, necessitating the use of an undercover white officer (Adam Driver) to play him in person, while the real Stallworth continued the ruse over the phone (oh what you could pull off in days before Google searches). Stallworth in fact got to be pretty good friends over the phone with then KKK grand wizard David Duke, and his undercover operation ended up yielding some fairly significant fruit, which I won't spoil here. The whole operation was kept hush-hush for decades until Stallworth decided to make it public upon his retirement, publishing his book  Black Klansman in 2014.

The bulk of this story, is in fact actually true, as improbable as it may seem. Some liberties were of course taken, there is one particular plot point towards the end that really feels like an example of Hollywood stakes raising, and I'm not entirely sure that girlfriend was real, but the operation itself, the friendship with Duke, and its ultimately legal results, again true. The film uses current racial tensions as part of its framing, which might turn some people off, but felt right to me. This is a funny, exciting, and at times tense movie, which I can think of nothing else like. One of the stand out films of the year so far. ****