[9.0/10] It was hard for me not to think of *The Departed* while watching *BlacKkKlansman*. While Spike Lee takes a much different tack with his “man undercover” movie than Martin Scorsese did with his, both films plop their protagonists in a double life, one where they have to feign loyalty to one group and preserve it for another, and plays in the tension and cognitive dissonance that this sort of forced split personality creates.

But *BlacKkKlansman* goes further on that front than *The Departed* did. It tells the story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer in Colorado Springs in the 1970s who, with the help of a fellow agent to do the body work and some phone line trickery, manages to infiltrate the Klu Klux Klan. Lee uses that premise to magnify the duality of his protagonist exponentially.

In Lee’s telling, Stallworth isn’t just a cop on the one hand, and a faux-member of a hate group at odds with them on the other. He creates a fictionalized persona for himself that he shares with another person, to where “Ron Stallworth” is, at once, a virulent but fictional white supremacist, a Jewish man who provide a physical presence, and a Black man who gives “Ron” his voice. And at the same time, the film establishes the real Ron as an outsider at the police station given the color of his skin, and an outsider in the black community given his affiliation with the cops.

As much as *BlacKkKlansman* is a film about the pathetic but persistent and pernicious nature of hate groups, as much as it succeeds in following the tension and catharsis of a police investigation that is fraught on multiple levels, it is first and foremost about identity: how it’s forged, how it can be forced upon you, and how much it is both informed by but also immutable within different contexts. Ron Stallworth is a black man, a cop, a colleague, a lover, an informant, an ally, and a card-carrying member of the KKK. This film is devoted to teasing out the threads of those different facets of his identity, and then tying them in knots.

And yet it works on each of these levels. It’s hard to miss when Lee intends the film as an object lesson on the cockroach-like qualities of the Klan and its brand of hate. He makes the movie’s resonance to current events all but explicit, and tempers his moments of victory over them with examples of how deep their hatred runs, how hard-if-not-impossible to stamp out that hatred is, and how little will there is at the top to do what it would take to accomplish that. Throughout the runtime, Lee peppers the audience with details about the KKK’s ideology fermenting in dark bars and family basements, the tendrils the group has wrapped around the hearts and minds of its members who hide in plain sight, and the efforts by those in charge to make their message palatable and dress it up as something more respectable to larger swaths of the public.

But at the same time, if you somehow missed all those ideas which barely qualify as subtext, *BlacKkKlansman* works just as well as a nuts and bolts undercover cop story. The pacing of the film is nigh-perfect, as Lee and company spoon out close calls and tense moments of increasing intensity with just the right rhythm. Stallworth and his partner come closer and closer to exposing the threat posed by the local Klan chapter, at the same time worst of the KKK’s hardliners come closer and closer to making that threat into a real life tragedy. The way Lee, as both writer and director, puts “Ron Stallworth” deeper into the machinations of the Klan at the same time the risks of exposure and harm are ratcheted up is near-perfect.

Still, apart from its social commentary, and its undercover cop flick bona fides, *BlacKkKlansman* serves as a meditation on what it means to carry a variety of different labels in modern American life, and how much our recognition of and willingness to own those labels comes when we’re confronted with them. No scene makes that point better than when Stallworth’s partner, Flip Zimmerman, reflects on the threats, implicit and explicit, he faced when going undercover as “Ron” given his semitic visage. He recognizes his privilege, how he could choose not to engage with his Jewish heritage because he didn’t want to and, more importantly, didn’t have to, until suddenly it created a mortal threat for him. Suddenly that slice of his identity takes up more room in his brain, becomes unavoidable, when it marks him not only as “the other” but puts him in the sort of danger the real Stallworth has to face everyday and can’t eschew so easily.

Still, as much as Lee wants to interrogate how much risk and differences expose those parts of our identities, he’s also very sly about drawing out the similarities between unlikely groups. He juxtaposes the rapt attention and cries of a group of black activists hearing a tale of horror recounted by their elder with the same stilled admiration and virulent chat of the local Klan listening to their leader. He mirrors the disdain and suspicion, in a way that neither humanizes the Klan or demonizes the activists, but rather spotlights the irony of these moments, and makes both known and recognizable rather than distant and abstract.

The cuts between the two groups are part and parcel with Lee’s mastery of the cinematic form in *BlacKkKlansman*. With a speech from a visiting luminary to the local young activists, Lee manages to capture the stirring power of the speaker’s call to action, the impressionistic signs of admiration by an audience inspired by the words, and the pull and resistance within an undercover Ron Stallworth, trying both to do his job and honor his community in a position that makes it hard to do either.

That’s what pushes this film ahead of *The Departed* in my book. Lee uses all his abilities to put Stallworth in a hall of mirrors, where he’s forced to face a myriad of different reflections of himself. Some are familiar, hopeful even. Some are haunting and inescapable. And others are barely recognizable, twisted and bent out of shape, But all of them are him in some way, and Lee never flinches from the internal conflict those different identities -- some chosen, some forced, some invented -- create for his star. Beyond cop or outlaw, beyond rich or poor, *BlacKkKlansman* dives into the different dimensions that brand us, buoy us, and define us in modern America, and ties and tears at them until it’s clear which can be changed and modulated and which are unalterable and inviolable, and for whom.