On “Jojo Rabbit,” Lebron James, and the politically unpolitical megaphone

Public figures want to speak out, but only if they know everyone will agree with them

In 2011, Taika Waititi’s mother passed along a book she had just read. It was called “Caging Skies,” a novel about a fervent young Nazi-in-training who discovers his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their house. Immediately Waititi wanted to adapt the story into a movie.

“But it’s a dark and serious book,” Waititi said Wednesday while introducing a screening of the movie, for which I happened to be sitting in the third row. He continued: “And I’m incapable of making a drah-ma.” The “a” sound comes out flat in his thick New Zealand accent, a voice that suits the laid back, comedic personality of the 44-year-old writer/director perfectly.

In Waititi’s wonderfully right-brain version of the story, his young protagonist would be accompanied by an imaginary friend, and that friend would be Adolph Hitler.

Gambling the success of your movie on whether audiences will laugh at, and often with, Hitler — history’s ultimate third rail — is an obvious risk. It wasn’t until after the success of Thor: Ragnarok, when Waititi proved he could wring all the comedy (and box office success) out of a previously brooding and…