In ‘One Night in Miami’, director Regina King depicts the version of the February 25, 1964 encounter between four icons, Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) and soul legend Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) leaving for a local liquor store to grab a bottle. It’s a bright night, and they meet some young men who first defeat Cooke’s beautiful sports car before exploding with joy when they recognize the boxer from his first world championship victory.
Cooke sends the boys cash to buy something for themselves, and the couple sits for a moment in Cooke’s flashy ride and processes what awaits them in the hotel room where their two other companions Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) wait.
Malcolm and Cooke did not have an intense argument, and the firefighter accused the crossover singer of not using his success to help the civil rights cause. The liquor store is Cooke’s way of retiring; back in his car, he expresses his frustration to Clay.
Clay plays the role of a wise nobleman at Cooke’s fighter and tells the singer to take it down. “We have to be there for each other. Because no one else can understand what it’s like to be one of us,” Clay says, “you know: young, black, fair, famous, irreconcilable.”
Scenes and moments like these make it easy to understand why Regina chose King Kemp Powers’ stage play as her directorial debut. King could just as well be the personification of the truth, a multiple Emmy, Golden Globe and Oscar winner who has found her wings through projects that tell the world about himself past, present and future.
Here, King lets narrative ingenuity shine through in every frame as she stays behind the camera, drawing us inside this circle of legends, each representing different aspects of black identity and struggle.
“One Night in Miami” is explicitly about these men, and this is not the first work about three out of four of them. But it may be the first to let us know in ways not previously revealed, despite and because Kemp abandons his vision between the approaches and points of view that are history.
The story is based on the night after Clay’s unexpected victory over reigning heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in February 1964, a battle that lured Brown, Cooke and Malcolm to Miami, Florida to cheer him up. The next morning, during a press conference, Clay confirms his conversation with Islam and introduces himself again as Cassius X. (He will only be officially known as Muhammad Ali some time later.) As for the time they spent together in the meantime has, no recordings exist.
But Kemp’s suspicion stems from a deep understanding of the burden of greatness and the unique effort it offers to a black man, even legends like them. Kemp writes this dissertation for their individual personalities, and King shapes it for the screen not as icons, but as men.
The victory of Cassius Clay is only one important moment associated with the event, which Kemp presents as an unsung point where several histories converge.
While most of the action takes place during a 114-minute runtime in a modest motel room, King and film photographer Tami Reiker can not help but emphasize the physical and mental closeness of these men, while Malcolm’s passion in some scenes is a binding, strengthening bond and divides into others. However simple it may be, Reiker films the interior with a glow and the exterior with a buoyancy to which the figures escape, as Clay and Cooke do, or regroup.
Malcolm would sail to Mecca and shortly afterwards publish his memoirs, and a year after the meeting he would be assassinated. Jim Brown’s first starring role in a movie took place the same year, launching an acting career that took him several decades during and after his professional football career ended. Sam Cooke was already a successful hitmaker who would release ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ in the same year 1964. . . and unfortunately, is killed in December by a motel manager.
Kemp uses the fact that Brown’s film debut and Cooke’s gripping piece of social justice also came out in 1964 to inspire the tense direction in which several conversations lead.
Malcolm knows he’s being followed. Sam is rich and famous and cannot even book his own room in the fancy hotel where he stays. Brown is a record holder in the NFL and the pride of his hometown, according to a white alleged friend of the family he visits while the movie begins. The man, played by Beau Bridges, is gracious and smiles broadly as he showeres the athlete with laurels, and he sounds equally polite as he refuses to allow him into his home, with a dehumanizing nickname rolling sweetly from his tongue as peach nectar.
It must be said that Hodge showcases his astonishing talent for blowing the emotion of his character through his eyes and face, even as he quietly speaks his lines. That quiet expressiveness drives the best performances throughout, and in it he throws a heat and a stoic strength into it that grabs your attention whenever he appears.
The personal nature of these conversations, even at their most severe, always returns to the timeless question that the successful and famous people owe to those who struggle without the benefit of fame. This is a film that notes that celebrities only liberate black stars to a limited extent and in some cases make the target on their backs even brighter.
Based on its premise, ‘One Night in Miami’ is a showcase for its cast. Where most historical fictions tend to expand the documentation to tell a story, and where the actors can consult photos or video footage to sculpt their depictions, this film finds life in speculations about what is getting away from the public, of cameras, where it is not necessary to deliver a display.
In this way, the actors, writer and director give the humanity of these men priority, as opposed to yet another personification of an icon.
This approach is most evident in Goree’s view of Clay and Ben-Adir’s recreation of Malcolm, two figures played by two of Hollywood’s biggest black stars. The actors retain enough of each one’s clear idiolect to recognize our individual way of speaking, but also expand on the familiar curve and edges in general imitations to give a sense of who they were and how they could act in quieter moments. .
Goree plays a version of the boxing legend who is newly famous, yet humorous without humility. Ben-Adir, who recently played Barack Obama in Showtime’s The Comey Rule, contrasts this with a version of Malcolm who is aware of his death toll and the danger he has in speaking to white America. It gives a gentle approach to his performance, and shows Malcolm as a father and a man concerned about the direction in which the struggle is heading and the danger.
But here the actor leads Malcolm’s gentle passion instead of drawing inspiration from the grim face popularized by history book photos, and it enriches the character in fresh ways.
However, Odom steals the spotlight at a moment when it looks like Malcolm wants to hit him in the dirt. When Malcolm followed up a brilliant rejection of his biggest hits by playing Bob Dylan’s’ Blowin ‘In the Wind’ and asking him why a white man writes lyrics that work better than talking to black people than he does, Odom states Cooke out of the chair he takes it to and turns it around: Why can’t Malcolm respect his focus on business investment, ownership and expansion? And is it not as important to uplift black Americans as words and songs? Odom recites it with the energy of a swordsman dying, and it’s amazing to watch.
Conflict is only a small part of ‘One Night in Miami’, another blessing King gives us to make this film. There are so many black films inspired by history colored by pain and so few that rest easily and safely for celebration, leaving the viewer with a sense of flourishing pride and pride.
At one point, one of them notices that black power, a phrase that white Americans fear, is not offensive or aggressive. Power only means a world where we are safe to be ourselves, he says. It is King who is using her power as a director for the first time, and what we have seen makes us excited to join future efforts.
“One Night in Miami” is currently streaming on Amazon.