BlacKkKlansman

In a dispatch for Filmmaker from Cannes, critic and filmmaker Blake Williams asserts that Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which won the festival’s Grand Prix, is too “angry” and “didactic” to be “nuanced.” The implication is that Lee’s film is artless agitprop. But there’s an argument to be made that BlacKkKlansman is not agitprop-like enough. In today’s antiseptic film culture, a popular transmutation of Brechtian lehrstücke would prove refreshingly anomalous. Instead, Lee’s film, which strives to be an entertaining crowd-pleaser, is an ultimately unsatisfying admixture of knockabout satire and intermittent social commentary. The satirical jabs, moreover, come off as superimposed on the narrative and are not consistently “earned.”

recounts the peculiar tale of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington, Denzel’s son), the first black cop on the