![]() Look at the casual manner with which the main plot gets going, as Ron, now shifted from records to undercover work, leafs through the local paper, finds an advertisement for the Klan, complete with a phone number, and dials it. As we follow his slow steps, leaden with rebuke, we realize that Washington’s every gesture, from here on, will be worth watching. One of them piques him with racist jibes, but Ron doesn’t strike back he merely takes a long, long time to do the fetching. Initially, Ron is consigned to the records room, fetching files for other officers. One of the producers is Jordan Peele, the maker of “Get Out.” Everything is primed for provocation. The real Stallworth recounted his experiences in a memoir, “Black Klansman,” which serves as the basis for Lee’s film. The story sounds so outrageous that you’re not sure whether to laugh, and, better yet, it happens to be true. One, he becomes a cop in Colorado Springs-the first African-American to do so, or, in his superior’s words, “the Jackie Robinson of the Colorado Springs police force.” Two, he infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan. Washington plays Ron Stallworth, a smart young fellow who, in the late nineteen-seventies, does two surprising things. If there is a Washington method, it is this: stay cool, and feed the flame. Both are graceful, thoughtful, and unrushed, keeping their wits at the heart of an inflammatory tale-not to douse it but to control the course of its fury. He is the son of Denzel, and, like his father before him, he owns the screen. ![]() Now, twenty-six years later, in Lee’s latest movie, “BlacKkKlansman,” one of those kids, John David Washington, gets a leading role for himself. At the end of “ Malcolm X,” Spike Lee’s formidable bio-pic of 1992, we see a bunch of schoolkids, standing up in turn to announce, “I’m Malcolm X.” Thus is the hero of the film, played with charismatic self-command by Denzel Washington, presented as the Spartacus of his people.
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