One Night in Miami

For her feature film directorial debut, actress Regina King (best known for television and for her roles in Boyz n the Hood, Jerry Maguire, and her Oscar-winning turn in If Beale Street Could Talk) delivers a solid adaptation of Kemp Powers’ 2013 stage play One Night in Miami. Like the play, the movie imagines what might have transpired between four African-American cultural legends on the night of Feb. 25, 1964. When Cassius Clay defeated heavy-weight champion Sonny Liston at the Miami Convention Hall that night, Clay celebrated his triumph with three iconic friends: the militant activist Malcolm X, the chart-topping soul singer Sam Cooke, and the football great turned wanna-be-movie-star Jim Brown. What they discussed during this one night is unknown. But we do know that afterwards, Clay changed his name to Cassius X, and then later to Muhammad Ali upon converting to Islam and affiliating with the Nation of Islam—the black nationalist organization of which Malcolm X was closely aligned. Also soon after, Malcolm X departed from the Nation and was eventually assassinated by two of its members.

Using these key historical facts, as well as other events that transpired in America during 1964 (Martin Luther King’s marches against segregation, the heated presidential campaigns of Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater, the release of Cooke's stirring social justice anthem "A Change Is Gonna Come" and Brown’s film debut in Rio Conchos), Kemp crafts a deft four-hander that imagines a spirited all-night conversation between these fascinating individuals. His play, and adapted screenplay, doesn’t claim to depict the actual thoughts of the four men, nor does it reduce them to two-dimensional avatars delivering historical and ideological talking points. Rather he creates fully realized characters that enable us to view these iconic figures both within their historical context and apart from how history has painted them.

Powers’ speculative play depicts these four together and in various groupings discussing their roles and responsibilities as influential Black men of power existing in a racist, deeply segregated country. The dialogue is direct but never hyperbolic. Each line originates from the dramatic need of the character in the moment, not from the need of the playwright to make a point. And Powers layers into the subtext of each exchange his central theme: the timeless question of what is the best way for successful members of an oppressed group to advance their cause and help those of their caste who don’t have the benefit of fame.

The bold choice not to open the play up too much sets One Night in Miami above so many stage adaptations that mistakenly try to break free from the dialogue-heavy medium. After the forty minutes or so of character backstory Kemp adds to the screenplay, the basic four-character / single set structure of his play remains intact. And rather than attempt to distract from the four-walled limitations of the setting, King leans into the theatrical conventions of the material by depicting the cheap motel where most of the action transpires as bland, cramped, and visually uninspiring. While the characters occasionally leave the confines of the Miami Hampton House hotel room for scenes on the roof, in the parking lot, courtyard, and a nearby store, most of the notable action takes place in this distinctly uncinematic venue. This choice allows the dialogue and the acting to take center stage as they would in a theater, yet One Night in Miami never comes across like a filmed play the way this same year’s movie version of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom does.

The energy that pulls us into the conflicts and connections of the four protagonists comes first and foremost from the excellent performances of British stage and TV actor Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke, Eli Goree as Cassius Clay, and Aldis Hodge as Jim Brown. The casting of relative unknowns, except for Odom, without elaborate make-up jobs to transform them into facsimiles of the real men they play, also works in the film’s favor. We are better able to experience these larger-than-life cultural figures as men rather than as legends when they are played without the grandeur movie stars would have brought to the roles. And Power’s depiction of these men is quite different from how most of us think of them. In One Night, the firebrand Malcolm X comes across as vulnerable and almost nerdy; we see the cocky Clay as insecure and indecisive, while the smooth charmer Cooke is arrogant and self-aggrandizing. Seeing sides of these men that are in opposition to their legacies never feels like a false depiction, but rather as a way of showing aspects of their personalities that surly existed within them, as they exist within every human being. Thus, One Night in Miami belongs among those rare biographical films that don’t just explore a time in American history most Americans should already know well but also invite us to look at iconic figures differently than we have before.