‘The Best of Enemies’ entertaining but flawed

In a time and place where blacks and whites rarely cooperate, a Ku Klux Klan leader agrees to help lead public meetings on the subject of possible school desegregation. The process transforms his life — and, by the way, everyone else’s — in “The Best of Enemies.”

Writer-director Robin Bissell trains the spotlight on C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell), a gas station owner and KKK “Exalted Cyclops” who liberalizes his outlook while collaborating with African American community activist Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson) in Durham, N.C., in 1971.

As in “Green Book,” the emphasis is defensible in terms of dramatic development: Ellis, not Atwater, is the one who changes as “The Best of Enemies” skillfully follows the uplift-movie formula. But that doesn’t make its scenario any less irksome.

The actual Ellis and Atwater really did become friends, but Bissell doesn’t scrupulously follow the 1996 book (by Osha Gray Davidson) and 2002 documentary (“An Unlikely Friendship”) that inspired him. Many of the details are fictional, although the movie is more faithful to the actual events than “Remember the Titans,” another desegregation fable set in 1971.

The movie’s Ellis is a mean-spirited, gun-toting racist with only one sensitive spot: his children. He comes to understand African American parents’ fears for their kids after Atwater points out that his are vulnerable, too. Ellis and his wife (Anne Heche) are particularly anguished about their son who has Down syndrome.

Bissell has crafted an effective mainstream entertainment, topped with a pleasing dollop of righteousness. But subtlety is not in his repertoire. The mostly short scenes are often overpowered by pop songs — including incongruous choices from Donovan and David Bowie’s back catalogues — and Henson’s performance is so broad it verges on farcical. “The Best of Enemies” is perhaps the first account of the United States’s traumatic racial history that could be adapted into a sitcom.