Inside, the auditorium of the local high school was bustling. Branford Marsalis and Junot Díaz were milling about, as was Guenveur Smith. For an hour onscreen, his sweaty, wide-eyed face held the room rapt. The performance was so sui generis and captivating, Lee didn’t have to do anything but set up cameras at a variety of angles and record it. Yet it is precisely the kind of offbeat, hallucinatory and essential project that also requires a deeply attuned but independent force to bring about.

Two nights later, Lee closed the festival with a screening of a teaser for “She’s Gotta Have It” — again at the high school in front of another packed house. It was Saturday, Aug. 12, the afternoon when white nationalists brought death to the streets of Charlottesville, Va. In the taxi, Lee had mentioned that he spoke to Obama earlier in the day, when he reached the 18th hole, behind Lee’s house. Obama hadn’t yet heard about what was happening because he’d been out on the course all day. Somehow that image struck me as unbearably sad. Perhaps it struck Lee that way, too, and we quickly changed the subject.

One of the things you hear over and over again about Lee is how loyal and generous he is in a business that is so often the opposite. He employs countless graduates of historically black colleges and universities in front of and especially behind the cameras, and many of them were at the screening, as well as hundreds of black Vineyard locals who had no particular connection but simply seemed grateful to be among the first to support one of their own, that rare voice who tells stories specifically for and about them. Lee calls black audiences like this his “base,” and he told me that he always tests out his work in front of them first because they’ll let you know “if this some [expletive].” He has cut scenes in the past after such encounters, including one from “Jungle Fever” that Wesley Snipes advised him never to show. The base, that night, erupted in applause. I wondered if my initial misgivings had been too harsh.

The poet Amiri Baraka once derisively wrote that Lee was “the quintessential buppie,” his work frivolous and bourgeois, but that is vicious. The Rev. Michael L. Pfleger, the real-life Chicago preacher behind John Cusack’s character in “Chi-Raq,” described him as “the conscience of Hollywood,” but that may be too generous. Roger Ebert, who recalled having been “too shaken to speak” after seeing “Do the Right Thing,” got the closest to the truth when he wrote about the fundamental “evenhandedness that is at the center of Spike Lee’s work,” a quality that is sadly “invisible to many of his viewers and critics.” It is this evenhandedness that causes some whites to recoil from him as angry, while at the very same time it makes some blacks cool to him as out of touch. It may be the most important, but by no means only, part of what makes him a genuine and lasting artist.

The most idyllic section of Fort Greene is found along the exquisitely preserved brownstone blocks of South Portland and South Oxford between DeKalb and Lafayette, and along stately Washington, which faces the procession of morning joggers, dog walkers and French-speaking nannies animating the park. It has gotten considerably whiter — and beiger — but it comprises an exceptionally confident mix that, in pockets, nearly rivals that of the Vineyard. Lee’s mother found her family’s brownstone on the park around the same time my elderly West Indian former landlord on South Portland acquired two abandoned addresses for the price of back taxes and the hassle of kicking out heroin addicts shooting up in the vestibules. Today the split between the black families who owned their homes and the population boxed in the projects is almost incomprehensible.

Yet Lee takes it as self-evident that race trumps class. As such, he is a man whose own phenomenal life can present certain contradictions. He is a vociferously outspoken critic of even mild gentrification, as discomfited by the erection of a skyscraper on Flatbush as the rent-is-too-damn-high guy. Chris Rock put his finger on the irony in “Brooklyn Boheme,” Diane Paragas and Nelson George’s 2011 documentary about the black-and-Latino creative community that blossomed in Fort Greene in the ’80s and ’90s. “Spike made ‘She’s Gotta Have It,’ ” Rock said, “and Fort Greene just became like — Brooklyn! Like, wow, there’s a place in Brooklyn where black people live, and it’s nice.” The complicated truth is that Lee, in film after film and more than almost any other single denizen, has played an integral part in his borough’s renewal process, with deeply urbane and humane portraits of his home that proved more attractive than even he may have intended.

The day after the festival ended, I met Lee at the 40 Acres and a Mule headquarters on South Elliott Place in Fort Greene, around the corner and down the block from where he grew up. It is a museum-like world unto itself that stretches over four floors all bursting with memorabilia, art, antique racial propaganda and movie posters with fond inscriptions from peers like Spielberg and Fellini. The outside of the building has always functioned as a way for Lee to communicate with the neighborhood directly. On that day, it was adorned with large, bright purple posters for the new “She’s Gotta Have It.” As he was locking up, three young black women approached him, took photos and thanked him for his work. He was still wearing the denim jacket with Esposito’s face on it (and for good measure, carrying an orange backpack adorned with his own likeness as Mars Blackmon). As he walked me across Lafayette Avenue and down Fulton, cars honked and strangers waved. Lee acknowledged all of them.

We had come to South Portland Avenue, where the local rap legend Notorious B.I.G. has for years now been reduced to a child-friendly caricature emblazoned on the side of an open-air Mexican-Cuban eco-cafe. “Brooklyn is gentrified!” Lee laughed, gesturing at all the new construction rising up around us. It is, and it has been for a long time now. Lee has solidified his own sort of landmarked status as a local and national treasure. But on that hot summer day, as we said goodbye and I watched him turn and walk away into that sanitized, rainbow-colored bobo wonderland, for the first time since I’d met him he seemed almost out of place.