Together with Sorry to Bother You, this was the other of the two important black films released last year though characteristically for the of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it was a third film, the less lauded Green Book, that actually won the Best Picture award. This is one of those based on real life stories that is so good that it just had to be made into a film though I understand that most of the later parts are fiction.

Ron Stallworth is hired by the Colorado Springs Police Department, a seemingly perfect candidate who gives just the right answers during the interview. At first he despairs at being assigned to the records room and is mocked by racist officers, he is later asked to pose undercover to attend a rally where civil rights leader Kwame Ture. There he meets student leader Patrice Dumas and starts a relationship with her. After the rally, Stallworth is reassigned to the intelligence division. There, he notices a recruitment advertisement for the Ku Klux Klan and calls, posing as a white man. The leader of the local chapter is fooled and through a combination of telephone calls and having a white police officer pose as him during face to face meetings, they manage to get Stallworth inducted as a member of the KKK in order to feed information about their activities to the police.

This film was made as a direct response to the Trump administration and even if it didn’t contain a clip of Donald Trump himself at the end, it would have been obvious from the use of phrases like ‘make America greater’. The sense outrage and anger here is palpable and of course deserving. However I am more impressed by its black empowerment angle. As it’s set in the 1970s, the film draws heavily on the exploitation films of the period and citing that black is beautiful, making copious use of the Afro look and the fashions of the era to cast the black characters as larger than life heroes. Another nice touch is that it contrasts female empowerment in the black movement against the subservience demanded of women in the white supremacist movement, a quirk of the far right that remains true today.

As fun and entertaining as it is to watch Stallworth get one up on the dumb and bigoted KKK members, it does become obvious that this is just a power fantasy. Things go too smoothly for him it to be plausible, especially how his department head backs him all the way and how everyone else in the police teams up to deal with that one racist officer. There’s nothing with power fantasies of course. We’re all used to how action movie heroes are always stronger, smarter, more skilled, and even luckier than the bad guys so why not one for black people winning against the white establishment. Still it feels a little dishonest that this is at least partially sold as being a real life story when so much of it is clearly made up. It also rather undersells how awful things were. For example while the FBI certainly kept an eye on the KKK back then, they actually saw the black power movement as a much more serious threat to the country.

The film ends with news clips of recent events to remind us that the story of the KKK isn’t over yet and to warn us to be wary of a resurgence of white supremacy. While all this is certainly true, the grimness doesn’t exactly play well with the comedic tone of the rest of the film which treats the KKK members as a bit of a joke. Overall I enjoyed this film very much but it’s not real and shouldn’t be seen or described as such.