BlacKKKlansman is one of a spate of new movies by filmmakers of color out this summer: Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Carl Lopez Estrada’s Blindspotting, and now this film, from a reenergized Spike Lee. Whatever you think of the merits of each one, together they seem to promise a new era of hard-edged, darkly comic, politically angry cinema that’s arrived not a moment too soon.

Lee’s film is inherently fascinating because its biographical source material, Ron Stallworth’s book Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime, is so incredible. Recognizing the jaw-dropping quality of the content, Lee includes an inter-title at the beginning of the film assuring us that this is “some fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t.”

It tells the story of Stallworth as a black rookie cop in the mid 1970s who is considered the “Jackie Robinson” of the notably racist all-white Colorado Springs Police Department. Desperate to get promoted out of the records room, where he fetches files for nasty white cops who outrank and abuse him, Stallworth is determined to become an undercover officer. He’s initially assigned to infiltrate an event hosted by the Colorado College Black Student Union featuring a speech by a leading member of the Black Panthers, Kwame Ture, better known by his birth name, Stokely Carmichael. Stallworth’s fellow cop tells him, “They say he’s a damn good speaker, so we don’t want this Carmichael getting into the minds of the good Negroes of Colorado Springs.”