Polemics

BLACKkKLANSMAN (B-minus) - This disappointing missed opportunity is a scattershot attack at racism, yet another Spike Lee joint that makes you miss the '90s. What are we to make of the cartoonish depictions of bumbling klansmen in Colorado Springs in 1972, or of a racist couple canoodling in bed, romantically rhapsodizing about realizing their dreams of defeating the inferior races? Such scenes are lost in the gulf between parody and ham-handed revisionist history.

Lee's heart is in this, but he undercuts his polemic with amateurish flourishes. The screenplay (by Lee as part of a committee, interpreting a memoir by officer Ron Stallworth) could have been written by a college freshman overdosing on Wikipedia entries, as clunky as the historical references get. The echoes between past and present are notable, but Lee, never one for subtlety, nudges the viewer in the ribs constantly. He does himself no favors with a final flourish of real-life news clips from the 2017 Charlottesville riot instigated by white supremacists; his quaint period piece looks simplistic by comparison.

John David Washington is rather drab as Stallworth, a black police officer who engages none other than David Duke over the phone, seeking to infiltrate the klan. The department sends in a fellow detective (Adam Driver) to stand in for Stallworth. Driver struggles to find the right tone as a Jew tossing around the n-word with this basket of deplorables. A trite love story also ensues -- gee, will the cute gal get peeved when she finds out Stallworth infiltrated the Black Power movement, too? Everyone involved here looks like they are grappling with Lee's shifts in tone, like a jazz combo without enough practice. Lee might want to just acknowledge that his greatest strength during the second half of his career lies in documentary filmmaking ("When the Levees Broke," "4 Little Girls") and not in two-hour-plus features overstuffed with undercooked ideas.

AMERICAN SOCIALIST (C+) - This paint-by-numbers biography of turn-of-the-century lefty Eugene V. Debs is useful if you don't know much about the man. This is what you would expect to see in a freshman survey course of socialism. Director Yale Strom frames the story with Debs' stints in prison, early on for trade union activities and later for speech violations during World War I. The diehard ran for president several times, peaking at 6 percent of the vote in 1912. Strom hits the highlights here.