It is 20 years since the release of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a movie that sounds like it is going to deliver a philosophical tract, but instead puts forward a cloudy, ambiguous message that continues to arouse controversy. More of that later: I remember the film for its beginning as much as its ending, a pummelling dance routine from Rosie Perez set to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”, hip-hop’s finest moment. Check it out on YouTube: it is as gripping an opening credits sequence as commercial cinema has ever known, and it set the tone for Lee’s febrile masterpiece.

The film, in which Lee plays a pizza delivery man entangled in the racial conflicts of a Brooklyn neighbourhood, ends in the death of a young black man at the hands of the police, which sparks a riot. Lee refused to deliver any kind of palliative resolution to the terrible events. The sense of inevitability is that of a Greek tragedy (although it is also very funny), but there is no god-granted solace in its conclusion.

It was all too much for many critics of the time, who accused Lee of whipping up the very tensions he was seeking to portray. Copycat mayhem was confidently predicted, but failed to materialise.

There was enough acclaim to push the film into several award shortlists, but it was beaten by inferior works: the Best Screenplay Oscar went to the ludicrous Dead Poets Society, while at Cannes the Palme d’Or was awarded to Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, which would have been an important film if onanism had been one of the world’s most pressing problems.

What particularly irked Lee’s detractors was his refusal to make a positive message out of the urban strife he had so brilliantly depicted. Not only that: he dared to suggest that he did not know what it was to do “the right thing” in the most explicit of ways – by ending the film with two contradictory quotations. One was from Martin Luther King, decrying the use of violence in the struggle for civil rights, and one from Malcolm X taking the opposing view: “I am not against using violence in self- defence. I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defence, I call it intelligence.”

It was one thing to hear those words from a radical activist of the 1960s, quite another to see them adorn a mainstream movie nearly 30 years later. By not giving Lee his deserved Best Screenplay Oscar, the Academy shielded us from an acceptance speech that would surely have been riveting.

It is gratifying to see the British Film Institute celebrating Do the Right Thing this month with a short season of films that influenced its making, or were in turn influenced by it. Lee may not wear his cinephilia on his sleeve as obviously as Quentin Tarantino, but his film had some notable cinematic antecedents.

The most obvious was Charles Laughton’s 1955 classic The Night of the Hunter, from which Lee took Robert Mitchum’s infamous love-hate speech and gave it to one of his own protagonists, Radio Raheem, the boombox-bearer who gets killed by the police. Another influence was Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, not only for its own portrayal of racial disquiet but for its masterful depiction of a sweltering summer’s day, which would also form an important backdrop to Do the Right Thing. As for what followed, it is hard to imagine the success of John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood without the ground-breaking Do the Right Thing a couple of years earlier. Singleton remains the only black person to be nominated for a best director Oscar. In the mid-1990s came Europe’s turn to address its own racial troubles, with Mathieu Kassovitz’s scabrous La Haine, also featuring in the BFI season.

So the tribute to Lee’s challenging work is well-conceived. It seems dated – were Air Jordans really that big a deal? (yes) – but its tone continues to reverberate: we may be in the Obama era, but we are also not so far from the disgraceful events that followed hurricane Katrina.

Lee tackled that subject too, in a four-part 2006 documentary, but in the more measured tones of career maturity. When I asked him about it in a short conversation via satellite when it was released, he cited Rome Open City and Bicycle Thieves as inspirations, works that grounded their polemics in their revolutionary visions of real life.

Still, I retain my affection for his earlier work, particularly that ambivalent ending. It was denounced at the time as a cop-out, but it was surely the ultimate statement of the artist’s prerogative. Great artistic statements are open-ended, speculative and amplify problems; political statements are the very opposite: they simplify and cajole.

Artists should be fanning flames of controversy even while politicians seek to douse them. That state of permanent tension could serve as a definition of a free society.

We need frank, articulate descriptions of what is happening around us as surely as the pithy prescriptions that seek to improve us. What is it to do the right thing? That has always been a question with more than one answer.

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden