The critics are calling BlacKKKlansman Spike Lee’s greatest movie. I haven’t seen all of his films so I can’t say if that is true, but I can say it is by far the best of his movies that I have seen, and one of the funniest, most wrenching and also, surprisingly, one of the most entertaining of his films.

It is a powerful and painfully real movie. In a sense, it sets out to tell the story of race in America through the surprising and sometimes hilarious misadventures of the first African-American member of the Colorado Springs Police Department, who successfully manages to infiltrate a local Ku Klux Klan chapter with the help of a white and Jewish fellow officer.

Lee remembers to be funny even as he takes aim at America’s festering sore, race.

The movie could have been written by a thriller novelist,  Undercover Detective Stalworth not only penetrates the Klan, he also, astonishingly, manages to become telephone buddies with David Duke, the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and a supporter of President Trump, whose words he often quotes approvingly, and to devastating effect in the film.

If you love movies, you will realize quickly that Lee’s film is almost a direct counterpoint to the infamous W. D. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation, an American epic that portrayed blacks as crude and ignorant assaulters of white women and cast the KKK in so heroic a light that it triggered a revival of the Klan, which had gone dormant after the Civil War.

By contemporary standards, the movie would be considered brazenly racist, but President Wilson had it shown at the White House, and praised it as an important piece of American history. He was right, but maybe not for the right reasons.

If I had seen the movie three years ago, before November of 2016, I would have considered it alarmist and knee jerk. Today, I consider it restrained, especially for Lee.  Like many of us, Lee portrays quotes and  scenes that were unthinkable just a few years ago, it seems like another age.

Most of BlackKKKlansman is really a mainstream Hollywood cop movie, interspersed with sometimes chilling reminders that racism in high places is all too real and all too obvious.

The contemporary truth of the movie, and its real point,  hits home from time to time like a small series of bombs  exploding in the midst of a good and suspenseful yarn, a kind of tense and thrilling French Connection with heavy racial overtones.

In movie terms, it is really an amazing achievement, well worth seeing for a lot of reasons.

In the midst of all the intrigue and tension, there is even a car chase or two and love interest with a radical African-American revolutionary (Patrice Dumas, played by Laura Harrier). She wants to lead a revolution, he has wanted all of his life to be a police officer.

Officer Ron  Stallworth (Denzel Washington’s son John David Washington), who got inside the Klan using a fellow officer, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), did a compelling and heartfelt job portraying the idealistic but quiet Stallworth, who first job was filing reports in the police department basement.

Over the course of his investigation, Stallworth begins to wake up and comes to conscious, but never goes as far as the revolutionaries and radicals he  has started to befriend.

But it was interesting for me to see how careful Lee was not to alienate or exclude whites from the movies. Several of the police officers were honest and supportive of his hero, and the Denzel character was almost apolitical, he never uttered a radical or incendiary thought, even in the face of great provocation.

Like Griffiths, Lee uses all kinds of cinematic fantasy tricks to go back in time,  flashbacks, old films, music, dancing, news clips, to keep a good story moving.

Scene by scene, he reminds us more and more convincingly that racism is  not only deeply entrenched in our country, and now seems to reside quite openly in the highest levels of our government, especially the White House.

It was easy to watch, it was painful to watch.

It is truly horrific to watch Lee put these pieces to together, one at a time, as our worst fears and suspicions suddenly become so clear and incontrovertible. If you are awake and paying attention, you sort of know what is happening, but to see it presented so skillfully and in such a thoughtful way is still both shocking and sickening.

More and more, it seems that white nationalism – invoked skillfully and credibly in the movie through the spoken words of David Duke and  other white nationalists – is not a sideshow of the circus that is the White House, but perhaps the point of it and of the November election.

I didn’t believe it or want to believe it – or couldn’t believe it – for the longest time, but I am coming to believe it now.

There is a raging debate about racism in America, one of those interminable left-right things,  the movie may clear up the confusion in many minds.

In a way, the film left me heartsick.

I saw film scenes interwoven into the movie that made me credulous to accept the fact that this is America, where hatred of black people is woven into the very fabric and history of the country, something we have never seemed to want to acknowledge or come to terms with.

The only truly violent part of the film comes when Harry Belafonte (playing activist Jerome Turner) makes a riveting appearance to narrate  the true story of a horrific lynching of a mentally retarded black teenager accused of lusting after a white woman. He tells the story to young African-American students, it is a wonder that there wasn’t a revolution.

I wouldn’t rule it out.

It seems that is our national horror story, race, is an awful ghost that keeps rising again and again while most people deny it, just like they deny what is happening to the earth. America has always seen what it wants to see and needs to see.

And why should race go away when it is being directly and indirectly invoked every day by people who claim to be our leaders?

At the end of the movie, Lee shows us harrowing images from Charlottesville, Va., and the Presidents stunningly moral-blind response to it. This is, of course, the point of the film, which starts out looking like a potential franchise, and ends up kicking us in the butt with truth.

In our polarized time, some people might wish to dismiss this movie – and the people who love it – as just another rant from the left side of things. I am not an ideologue in any way, I think this is a great movie and an important one.

The best way I can describe it as funny, righteously furious and very, very powerful.

Maria and I felt it so strongly that we couldn’t speak for nearly an hour as we drove home to the farm together.

We probably have not been so silent for that long after a movie in our decade of movie-going together. It took Spike Lee to do it.