One Night in Miami…
“One Night in Miami…” is about a meeting of minds between icons. In her feature directorial debut, actress Regina King adapts a stage play by Kemp Powers (also one of the creative forces of Pixar’s “Soul”) about a meeting between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in a hotel room in Miami. Though the four were friends in real life, the meeting never happened. Throughout the course of the film’s 114 minutes, we explore each icon’s place in society at the time, and how each one uses their respective platforms to the Black community in the 1960s. It’s a film that one can just slide into and enjoy, while also being given much to think about.
As the film begins, Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) is fighting in England, and though he seems to be giving his opponent a good beating, he ends up losing. Next we see Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) as he performs at the Copacabana in front of a white audience, which is none too receptive of him. We then see Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) at St. Simons, Georgia, going to visit a neighbor who’s an admirer; that admiration will only get him on the doorstep, though- even the man who just set the NFL record for rushing in a season is the wrong color to be let in the house. Finally, we see Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), or rather, his wife (Joaquina Kalukango) as she’s watching one of his speeches before he comes home. Individually, these sequences paint a picture of the forces these men are up against, even with the accolades they are given. On the night Cassius Clay fights, and defeats, Sonny Liston in Miami in February 1964, Malcolm X has gathered all of these men into a hotel room, with members of the Nation of Islam looking out after them, to celebrate, and to discuss the roads ahead for each man.
One of the things I appreciate about “One Night in Miami…” is how it doesn’t trade on the iconography of these men, but just sees them as individuals. We see Cassius Clay starting the night with his conversion to Islam as a secret, and then- as Cooke and Brown are made aware of it- see the conflict he feels in how Malcolm X sees him as a recruiting tool almost more than an individual on a spiritual journey. We see Malcolm X challenging Brown and Cooke on how they’re using their platforms for the sake of elevating Black issues of social justice, and how they push back on Malcolm’s ideas of what that looks like. And we see personal moments with Malcolm talking to his family, humanizing the revolutionary who brought these four together this night. Each of the main four actors in this film are superb at bringing these people to life- if they were just doing imitations, like a lesser “inspired by a true story” effort would be, we wouldn’t feel quite the connection to these men as we do, which is a credit to Powers’s screenplay and King’s direction. She allows these actors room to bring emotional authenticity to the characters that helps keep us entertaining, but also feel like we’re watching something insightful about each of these men, and the ways they shaped the time they were living in.
