In “One Night in Miami”, director Regina King imagined a version of the February 25, 1964 encounter between four icons, Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) and soul legend Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) going to a store local liquor store to buy a bottle. It’s a clear night, and they meet two young men who first look at Cooke’s impressive sports car before bursting with joy as he recognizes the boxer from his first world championship victory.
Cooke sends the boys with money to buy them something, and the pair sit for a moment on Cooke’s extravagant stroll and process what awaits them back to the hotel room, where their other two companions Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) are waiting.
Malcolm and Cooke are finished with an intense discussion, with the arsonist accusing the crossover singer of not using his success to help the civil rights cause. Running the liquor store is Cooke’s way of withdrawing; back in the car expresses his frustration to Clay.
Playing the role of a wise man on the corner of Cooke’s fighter, Clay tells the singer to ignore this. “We have to be there for each other. Because nobody else can understand what it’s like to be one of us,” says Clay, “You know: young, black, fair, famous, without remorse.”
Scenes and moments like these make it easy to understand why Regina King chose Kemp Powers’ play as her directorial debut. King may well be the personification of that truth, an Emmy, Golden Globe and Oscar winner who found her wings through projects that tell the world about herself, past, present and future.
Here King allows narrative ingenuity to permeate each frame while it remains behind the camera, drawing us into this circle of legends, each of which represents distinct aspects of identity and black struggle.
“One Night in Miami” is expressly about these men, and it is not the first work on three out of four of them. But it may be the first that allows us to get to know them in previously undisclosed ways, despite and because Kemp bets his vision between the points of entry and exit that are confirmed history.
The story is based on the night after Clay’s unexpected victory over current heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in February 1964, a fight that drew Brown, Cooke and Malcolm to Miami, Florida, to cheer for him. The next morning, Clay confirmed his conversation with Islam at a news conference, reintroducing himself as Cassius X. (He would not be officially known as Muhammad Ali until some time later.) As for what happened during the time they spent together in the meantime. , there are no recordings.
But Kemp’s conjecture comes from a deep understanding of the burden of greatness and the unique effort it represents for a black man, even legends in the making like them. Kemp writes this thesis for his individual personalities, and King shapes them for the canvas not as icons, but as men.
Cassius Clay’s victory is just a significant moment linked to this meeting, which Kemp presents as an unknown point where several stories converge.
With most of the 114-minute action taking place in a modest motel room, King and cameraman Tami Reiker cannot help emphasizing the physical and spiritual closeness of these men, with Malcolm’s passion serving as a bond, strengthening the loop in some scenes and divider in others. As simple as the setting 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 make his pilgrimage to Mecca and publish his memoirs shortly thereafter, and a year after the meeting, he would be murdered. Jim Brown’s first leading role in a film came in the same year, launching an acting career that sustained him for several decades during and after the end of his professional football career. Sam Cooke was already a successful hitmaker who would release “A Change Is Gonna Come” in the same year 1964.. . and, unfortunately, being killed by a motel manager in December.
Kemp uses the fact that Brown’s film debut and Cooke’s exciting piece of social justice also came out in 1964 to inspire the tense direction that various conversations take.
Malcolm knows he is being followed. Sam is rich and famous and cannot even book a room at the chic hotel where he is staying. Brown is the NFL record holder and the pride of his hometown, according to an alleged white family friend he visits at the beginning of the film. The man, played by Beau Bridges, is graceful and smiles widely as he fills the athlete with laurels, and seems equally polite when he refuses to let him into his home, using a dehumanizing epithet that rolls on his tongue sweetly like peach nectar. .
Hodge, it must be said, shows his surprising talent for blowing up his character’s emotion through his eyes and face, even when he is quietly speaking his lines. This silent expressiveness consistently enhances all the best performances, and in it he pours a stoic force and warmth that catches your attention whenever he appears.
The personal nature of these conversations, even the toughest ones, always returns to the timeless question of what the successful and famous owe to those who are struggling without the benefit of fame. This is a film that is careful to point out that the celebrity only releases black stars to a limited degree and, in some cases, makes the target on his back even brighter.
Because of its premise, “One Night in Miami” is a showcase for its cast. Where most historical fictions tend to expand documentation to tell a story, and where actors can consult photos or videos to sculpt their portraits, this film finds life in assumptions about what transpires away from the audience, from the cameras, where there is none need to do a show.
In doing so, the actors, screenwriter and director prioritize humanity in these men instead of presenting yet another personification of an icon.
This approach is most apparent in Goree’s view of Clay and Ben-Adir’s re-creation of Malcolm, two figures played by two of Hollywood’s biggest black stars. The actors retain enough of each man’s distinctive idiolet so that we can recognize their individual ways of speaking, but they also expand the familiar curve and edges into common personifications to convey a sense of who they were and how they might have behaved in moments calmer.
Goree is playing a version of the boxing legend that just got famous, but still humorously devoid of humility. Ben-Adir, who recently played Barack Obama in Showtime’s “The Comey Rule”, contrasts this with a version of Malcolm aware of his mortality and the danger he faced in speaking the truth for white America. This takes a gentle approach to his performance, showing Malcolm as a father and husband concerned with the direction the fight was taking and the danger.
But here the actor follows Malcolm’s gentle passion, instead of being inspired by the dark face popularized by pictures from history books, and this enriches the character in new ways.
Odom, however, steals the spotlight at a time when it looks like Malcolm is determined to throw him on the floor. When Malcolm follows a blunt rejection of his biggest hits, playing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin ‘In the Wind” and asking why a white man is writing lyrics that speak better to black people than he does, Odom throws Cooke from the chair where he is picking up and changing: Why can’t Malcolm respect his focus on investment, property and business expansion? And isn’t that just as crucial to cheering up black Americans as words and songs? Odom recites this with the energy of a swordsman dueling to death, and it is incredible to watch.
The conflict is only a small part of “One Night in Miami”, another blessing that King gives us in making this film. There are so many black films inspired by the story that are colored by pain and so few that rest easily and safely in the celebration, leaving the viewer with a sense of joy and pride flourishing.
At one point, one notes that black power, a phrase that white Americans grew up to fear, is not offensive or aggressive. Power just means a world where we are safe to be ourselves, he says. This is King using his power as a director for the first time, and what we’ve seen makes us excited to connect with future efforts.
“One Night in Miami” is currently being broadcast on Amazon.