Dunwitty is an odious buffoon, but he's right that Delacroix -- whose last, failed show about "dignified middle-class Negroes" was called "Brown-Nose Jones" -- is fatally confused and out of touch with his own anger. (I'm sure it's true that even wannabe-homeboy network execs spout those kinds of clichés these days.) Thus challenged, Delacroix responds with his idea for a new show that will be "different," "impactful" and "cutting edge": black actors in blackface and classic minstrel get-ups, playing "real coons" who sing, dance and cavort in a watermelon patch.

"Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show" really has to be seen to be believed; I suppose it is too outrageously offensive for real-world television, but probably not by much. Delacroix recruits a couple of sidewalk performers named Man Ray (Savion Glover, the dancer and choreographer behind "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk") and Womack (Tommy Davidson) and rechristens them Mantan (after Mantan Moreland, a black actor famous in the 1940s) and Sleep 'N Eat, respectively. Their supporting cast includes characters named Aunt Jemima, Li'l Nigger Jim, Sambo and Rastus, along with a band called the Alabama Porch Monkeys (played by the Roots).

When we watch Mantan actually burning corks in alcohol and applying the resulting sludge to his skin (over a layer of cocoa butter), "Bamboozled" suddenly drops out of its frenetic satirical mode into a sudden, and agonizing, moment of historical insight. Mantan is supposed to be an inarticulate guy eager for the big time: "As long as I'm hoofin' and gettin' some loot, I'm good," he tells Delacroix. But you can virtually taste the bile rising in Glover's throat as he puts on the mask of blackness, or at least the invented version of it that has hypnotized our society since it began.

Every so often, dreamlike streams of images -- from "race films" and classic Hollywood, from cartoons and newsreels, from "Amos 'n' Andy" and "The Jeffersons" -- break through the surface of "Bamboozled," as if the film's subconscious (or Delacroix's conscience) were acting up. I can already hear Lee's critics protesting that this onslaught of racist archival material tries to bully the audience into emotions of guilt or rage. Mind you, these are probably the same people who argued that "Do the Right Thing" would incite race riots; the troubled emotions they're worried about are mostly their own. As a technique, this reminds me of the fragments of early cinema that interrupt Ingmar Bergman's "Persona," but its import, I think, is not as difficult to understand.

This array of shuffling servants, kerchief-clad mammies, grinning cartoon "pickaninnies" and jive-ass pimps is almost overwhelmingly painful to watch. Lee's point, as I read it, is that all Americans, white, black and otherwise, have been indoctrinated by relentless decades of these stereotypes. The classic blackface minstrel shows of the 19th century, and most subsequent ideas about blacks, were driven by envy almost as much as contempt. Black caricatures like Mantan and Sleep 'N Eat are ignorant, lazy and unlucky (as Delacroix explains to the delighted Dunwitty), but they're also free of the restraints and obligations of white society. These depictions of blackness, shaped by a poisoned history that is neither long in the past nor far below the surface, have seduced blacks and whites in different but interrelated ways. We ignore that history at our peril.

Lee keeps both sides of his razor sharp throughout "Bamboozled," something he hasn't effectively done in earlier films. Sure, the minstrel show is appalling, but it's also undeniably hilarious at times. When the Mau Maus, who have set themselves up as the radical opposition to Delacroix's reckless Uncle Tom-ing, watch the show with expressions of dour disapproval, one of them can't help cracking up. Delacroix's rationale for his show is not too different, one imagines, from Lee's rationale for his movie: "Martin Luther King did not enjoy seeing his people beaten on the 6 o'clock news," he says. "But white people needed to see it." (Earlier, he quotes Mark Twain to the effect that satire may be a tool that can help forge racial harmony.)

As for the Mau Maus, Lee paints them as only slightly less ridiculous caricatures of blackness, in their gold chains, 'do rags and baggy FUBU jeans, than Mantan and Sleep 'N Eat. Sloan's brother Julius (rapper Mos Def), who now calls himself Big Black Africa, is the group's leader, and the best he can do by way of philosophy is to insist, "We talking about getting free in America, USA, KKK, all that shit." Like everybody else, Big Black's real agenda is to get on TV; if the Monkees and the Partridge Family could get their own shows, he asks Sloan, why can't the Mau Maus? The band's major militant insight, fueled by plenty of ganja and bottles of Da Bomb, is that the letter "c" must be removed from the word "black." (Mysteriously, one member of the group, played by rapper MC Serch, is white -- a fact that nobody seems to notice until it suddenly and shockingly becomes relevant late in the film.)

As Delacroix's minstrel show becomes a smash hit -- despite protests led by Al Sharpton and Johnnie Cochran -- members of the studio audience, whether white, black, Latino or Asian, start showing up in blackface and proudly proclaiming themselves "niggers." With his customary desire to pack all his thoughts and observations about the world into a movie, Lee drives his story into hallucinatory excess, as if searching for the perfect apotheosis of all his themes. Delacroix gradually goes insane, surrounded by his increasingly ominous collection of vintage racist toys. Mantan is kidnapped by the Mau Maus, and we get tossed-off commentary on everything from Tommy Hilfiger to Rudy Giuliani's housing policy to the Amadou Diallo shooting.

Lee's title is drawn from a speech by Malcolm X that he sneaks into one of his montage scenes (as seen in his own 1992 film). "You've been hoodwinked," Malcolm tells his Harlem audience. "You've been had. You've been took. You've been led astray, run amuck. You've been bamboozled." Is this a different way of expressing Junebug's cynical maxim: "Every nigger is an entertainer"? Is there no difference between the obsequious clowning of Stephin Fetchit and a millionaire gangsta rapper? "Bamboozled" is Lee's richest, angriest, funniest movie. But if it were rhetoric rather than film, it would be a flood of furious questions, most of them, like Pierre Delacroix's dilemma, irresolvable.

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