Jordan Peele is famous, in part, for imitations -- of rappers and dingbats and the 44th president of the United States. But he would be impossible to imitate. He isn't ribald. He's droll. Sometimes he's not even that. Sometimes he's quiet. Sometimes he's sitting across from you expecting you to hold up your end of a conversation. Sometimes he's listening and hearing you -- like, really hearing you. This is the Peele who made ''Get Out,'' and it takes a minute to square him with the Peele from ''Key & Peele.''

On Halloween, we had lunch at one of those casually cool American bistros in Los Angeles where all the food seems as if it was grown out back. He chose a spot outside, not to be seen (although a few people saw him) but mostly to see. Peele, who is 38, lives in his head, and he watches the world around him intensely. I got the duck, then so did he, and while we ate I was pretty sure I could hear him thinking. It was toward the end of the meal when he saw someone he recognized. Well, he thought he did.

''He's dressed like Chris,'' he said with some amusement. ''Do you think he's being Chris?'' He was looking past me, so it was hard to turn all the way around to confirm with any subtlety. But Peele's gaze made it perfectly obvious to the person approaching that Peele was looking at him. ''Are you Chris from 'Get Out' for Halloween?'' Peele asked, committing less an act of racial profiling than an uncanny identification of his own handiwork. ''Get Out,'' of course, is the surprise hit movie that Peele wrote and directed about a black man named Chris, who discovers that his white girlfriend's family is running a nasty racist conspiracy. Chris has big, watery eyes that seem red from weariness (or weed) and wears a collarless blue chambray shirt over a gray T-shirt and jeans.

The man Peele thought might be costumed as Chris was also black, with skin as dark and eyes as striking as those of Daniel Kaluuya, the actor who plays Chris. This impostor was indeed Chris-attired too. And the white woman he was with could also have been part of the costume. It was the sort of similarity that, once pointed out, can't be unseen. Alas, it wasn't Halloween for this guy, just Tuesday. He was thrilled, nonetheless, to be stopped by Chris's inventor, and he asked Peele for a photo. Peele, who got a kick even out of being wrong, asked him for one, too. The impostor then offered an incidental, partial explanation for why ''Get Out'' became the phenomenon it did: No, he wasn't Chris, ''but I could be.''

It has been 10 months, and we're still talking about this movie and its alarming presentation of white racism. ''Get Out'' opened at the top of the box office at the end of February and has grossed many, many times the...