Adam Driver plays the partner of John David Washington’s Ron Stallworth, a black police detective who infiltrated the KKK, in a first look image from Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. In his first feature film since 2015’s Chi-Raq, Spike Lee tells the unlikely true story of how Ron Stallworth, the first black police detective in Colorado Springs history, managed to execute an undercover operation that saw him posing as a member of the KKK.

Not only did Stallworth infiltrate the Klan’s Colorado Springs operation, rising to become a leader of the chapter, he also got to know famed former Klan Grand Wizard and latter-day politician David Duke. Stallworth pulled off his unlikely operation with the help of his white partner, referred to in his book as “Chuck,” who would attend face-to-face meetings in Stallworth’s place while Stallworth did his end over the phone. In Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, Adam Driver plays the role of Stallworth’s partner, now named “Flip Zimmerman.”

Via EW, we have now gotten our first look at Adam Driver together with John David Washington in BlacKkKlansman. The film takes place in the late ’70s, as becomes immediately obvious from the hair. In the scene, Washington’s Stallworth shows Flip his KKK card. As Washington told EW, the real Stallworth still has his Klan card to this day and happily shows it off to anyone who wants to see it. Check out the image, below.

Audiences who got to see footage from BlacKkKlansman at last week’s CinemaCon described the film surprisingly as almost a buddy comedy between Washington’s character and Driver’s. Indeed, Spike Lee has a reputation for infusing humor into his otherwise serious topical films in this way. Sometimes Lee receives criticism for an excessive willingness to subvert genre in such a manner, as in his 1992 film Malcolm X, which threw a full-on musical number into the biopic of the famed civil rights leader.

As for the comedy trappings in BlacKkKlansman, Jason Blum (whose Blumhouse Productions has a stake in the film along with Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw), said at CinemaCon that the movie is all about “shining a light on how stupid and idiotic” the KKK are (via THR). Evidently, Klan leadership is so bungling and inept that there was no way to depict Stallworth’s story without going into comedic territory. Lee’s provocative, and apparently surprisingly entertaining, film gets its world premiere at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival ahead of a U.S. release timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Charlottesville.

BlacKkKlansman also stars Topher Grace as David Duke and Corey Hawkins as Stokely Charmichael. Laura Harrier, Paul Walter Hauser, Jasper Pääkkönen, Ryan Eggold, Ashlie Atkinson and Harry Belafonte round out the cast. In addition to BlacKkKlansman, Adam Driver can soon be seen - assuming the legal issues clear up and the movie is allowed to be released - in Terry Gilliam’s long-awaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

More: Spike Lee Developing Nightwatch Movie

Source: EW

  • black klansman Release Date: 2018-08-10