“Remember this: nobody puts words in my mouth.”

– Malcolm X*

The very opening image of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X is, in many ways, and quite appropriately, indicative of the quality of the next three hours and twenty one minutes: an American flag caught aflame until the sigil of the eponymous hero’s chosen surname remains centered on the screen, while a speech of his blasts alongside Terence Blanchard’s semi-menacing brass score. Footage of Rodney King’s 1991 beating at the hands of LAPD officers intercut the conflagration.

An important thing to clarify, which may or may not escape the notice of first-time viewers (like me): the audio of the speech playing over the burning flag is not a verbatim transcript of, to my knowledge, any actual speech delivered by the historical Malcolm X. It is instead a composite of Malcolm X’s views—most pertinently from his famous 1964 “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, admixed with words from The Trial, a Black Nationalist morality play written by Louis Farrakhan—crafted by the writer-director himself.

Pair this with the Rodney King interpolation, and it is impossible not to acknowledge, from the preliminary seconds of the film, a stylized departure from whomever Malcolm X (Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) was in his living days into something more along the lines of a representation—a mascot, even, to put it less charitably—that serves the purposes of a particular artist in a particular time and place; a time and place which is, in spite of the continuing relevance of Malcolm X when it comes to the brutalization of Black people in America and the world over, rather distinct from the milieu the man himself emerged from, and thrived in, and learned to oppose. […]