The film stars John David Washington as Stallworth, along with Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, and Topher Grace.

The film was produced by Lee, Raymond Mansfield, Shaun Redick, Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, and Jordan Peele.

The film received critical acclaim, with praise for Lee's direction, the performances (particularly of Washington and Driver), and timely themes.

He speaks with Walter Breachway, the president of the Colorado Springs chapter, but soon realizes that not only did he use his real name, but he must also meet the Klan members.

Stallworth recruits his Jewish coworker, Flip Zimmerman, to impersonate him and meet the KKK members while he continues posing as white on the phone.

Under Stallworth's identity, Zimmerman meets Breachway, the slightly more reckless and unstable Felix Kendrickson (and later his wife Connie), and Ivanhoe, who cryptically refers to an upcoming terrorist attack.

Calling Ku Klux Klan headquarters in Louisiana to expedite his membership, Stallworth begins regular phone conversations with Grand Wizard David Duke.

Once Zimmerman, masquerading as Stallworth, is initiated, Connie Kendrickson leaves the ceremony to place an explosive device at a local civil rights rally.

When Connie notices a heavy police presence at the rally, she puts Felix's backup plan into action and plants the device at Dumas's house, leaving it under her car when it will not fit into the mailbox.

The film cuts to footage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally, the hit and run attack that killed and injured protesters, part of a speech by David Duke, and comments by President Donald Trump.

They interviewed Stallworth and wrote a spec screenplay, then pitched the script to producers Shaun Redick and Ray Mansfield.

[4][5] In September of that year, Spike Lee signed on as director and John David Washington was in negotiations to star.

[16] Lee ends the film with a tribute to anti-fascist counter-protester Heather Heyer, who was killed on August 12, 2017, in the Charlottesville car attack during the Unite the Right rally.

The website's critical consensus reads, "BlacKkKlansman uses history to offer bitingly trenchant commentary on current events—and brings out some of Spike Lee's hardest-hitting work in decades along the way.

[23] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film three out of five stars, writing: "It's an entertaining spectacle but the brilliant tonal balance in something like Jordan Peele's satire Get Out leaves this looking a little exposed.

[28] For IndieWire, David Ehrlich gave the film a grade of "B+" and wrote that it is "far more frightening than it is funny", and "packages such weighty and ultra-relevant subjects into the form of a wildly uneven but consistently entertaining night at the movies".

The most shocking thing about Flip's (Adam Driver's undercover detective role) imposture is how easy it seems, how natural he looks and sounds.

This unnerving authenticity is partly testament to Mr. Driver's ability to tuck one performance inside another, but it also testifies to a stark and discomforting truth.

Edelstein stated: "Lee himself has a propagandist streak, and he knows nothing ever sold the message of white emasculation and the existential necessity of keeping blacks down as well as Griffith's 1915 film.

[32] While Riley called the craft of the film "masterful" and cited Lee as a major influence on his own work, he felt that the film was dishonestly marketed as a true story and criticized its attempts to "make a cop the protagonist in the fight against racist oppression", when Black Americans face structural racism "from the police on a day-to-day basis".