Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Ryan Eggold, Topher Grace, Jasper Paakkonen, Michael Buscemi, Paul Walter Hauser, Ashlie Atkinson, Alec Baldwin, Isaiah Whitlock Jr, Damaris Lewis, Ato Blankson-Wood, Corey Hawkins, Robert John Burke, Brian Tarantina, Arthur J. Nascarella, Ken Garito, Frederick Weller, Robert John Burke, Dared Wright, Faron Salisbury, Ryan Preimesberger, Harry Belafonte, Gina Belafonte.

It takes vision and bluntness of spirit to put into Art what everybody should understand anyway, if then that doesn’t succeed, then perhaps the only thing to do is call upon the likes of Spike Lee or Quentin Tarantino, to give them almost carte blanche to depict the world as it was, and in many cases it unbelievably still is. To provide social comment that is hard-hitting, passionate and right on the money, even it infuriates and causes tension in the minds that it sets out to dismiss with a hand gesture, for those who see the fortune in glorifying racism are nothing more than ineffectual zealots and practitioners of vile behaviour.

Whilst some of Ron Stallworth’s story has been changed, for impact and time scale purposes, The Blackkklansman is one of the hardest hitting, immensely enjoyable and direct films that an audience member might see for quite some time.

The Blackkklansman suffers no fools but revels in bringing both the hypocrisy of certain classes of people and the truth of their actions to the very front of people’s minds. The film effectively showcases the insanity of those who believe that the white person is superior to the black man or woman, the stupidity of their rhetoric and belief but it also has the fire to show the extreme of their thought. In scenes where the legendary Harry Belafonte is describing the heartbreak felt of witnessing a lynching, the fear of such reprisals from another human being, the terror hits home, the magnitude of how we treat people is palpable as the message comes over on screen. It is a message that explodes at the end of the film as scenes only within the last year in America are replayed and repeated for the viewer to feel the uncomfortableness of the times with.

With tremendous performances by John David Washington as Ron Smallworth, Ryan Eggold as Walter Breachway and Topher Grace as David Duke, The Blackkklansman is not only a powerful depiction of the trouble still haunting the American psyche but of the tearing apart of a spirit in which so much hope has been placed, that all the hard work that has happened, can still be found to be built upon narrow-minded opinions and the fear that threatens to spill over as bigots and uneducated people find ways to put a nation and civility at risk.

Ian D. Hall