It’s amazing the reviews that called this heavy handed and overwrought when the same _year_ Jimmy Fallon was doing blackface on SNL. When this predicted the Chappelle Show three years later, Chappelle leaving due to the wrong people laughing six years later, and Chappelle becoming Delacroix today, all too happy to punch down and pal around with the same white opportunists he hated for the money and social capita. When there’s always another blackface episode of something being taken down. When Tarantino proudly gets away with his racial slurs up to Django and Hateful Eight.

You can feel all of that bitterness of past, present, and future in this film. Lee didn’t come to play. The writer’s room is a standout; the stammering ‘blank people of color- of Africa’ is pitch perfect. The last crowd scene with Honeycutt is so unnerving. And Jada-Pinkett Smith, Savion Glover, and Tommy Davidson are all just excellent. The biggest things holding this film back is the muddled treatment of the radicals- I see the point of how too often it’s the black actors or crew or workers just trying to get by who suffer the consequences and so rarely the whites in power, but it still lacks nuance for the radicals and reeks of condescension- and Damon Wayans. That accent. Why.

But Delacroix is mostly a device to get the film moving, and that film is a cutting and furious experience I’m glad I watched.