Arriving a year after white supremacists marched in the streets of Charlottesville, Spike Lee's BlackKklansman is a slapstick comedy, a blaxsploitation throwback and an incendiary Molotov cocktail thrown into the foray of the modern multiplex.
The most urgent, clear-voiced and, arguably, best of the outspoken filmmaker's recent output, the film explores the astonishing true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) a black Colorado detective who successfully infiltrated the local sect of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.
The story is immediately attention-grabbing and continually draws parallels between its story and the modern-day American racial landscape. None of it is subtle - characters often serve as mouthpieces for the director, delivering long speeches or conversations on everything from the police state to slavery - but for a film that functions as a reaction to Trump's America, how could it be?
What is surprising is how Lee has built BlackKklansman into a crowd-pleasing, almost madcap experience. The film's depiction of racists, particularly those within the Klan, tends toward the humorous – those in the Klan are menacing, but mostly pretty stupid.
This is perhaps to be expected for a film about Klansmen falling for a black man posing as a fellow white supremacist, but Lee pulls back when it comes to indicting less obvious cases of the same in modern society.
