An audacious what-if scenario lies at the heart of Regina King‘s poised, well-crafted but conceptually conflicted directorial debut, “One Night in Miami,” a high-minded drama that plays as an all-star real-life Black superhero team-up: What if newly-crowned World Heavyweight Champion Cassius Clay, singer Sam Cooke, NFL record breaker Jim Brown and a Malcom X on the cusp of breaking with the Nation of Islam, spent the pivotal night of February 25, 1964 sparring, bickering and mutually inspiring in a hotel room in Miami? It boggles the mind, but this isn’t speculative fan-fic; it’s not a what-if at all. On the night of Clay’s first defeat of Sonny Liston, the four men, all friends, did reportedly gather at the Hampton House Hotel in Overtown, Florida. So “One Night in Miami”‘s what if is a different one: what if the conversation between them had somehow been recorded for posterity?
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It sounds like the set up for a one-room play, and that’s because it is based on one, and therein lies the major issue with “One Night in Miami” as a film. When it is playing to the strengths of the cinematic form, it can be dynamic, exciting, even moving – viz an ending in which Sam Cooke, played by Leslie Odom Jr, sings sweetly, smoothly “A Change Is Gonna Come” over the epilogue. But when – and this forms the greater part of the movie – we’re in that small hotel room, with four outsize characters pacing out their tightly choreographed marks, celebrating and castigating each other in equal measure in the kind of singleminded, expository dialogues that almost never happen in real life, we quickly start to wonder when the curtain’s going to fall. Tl;dr? Kemp Powers adapts his own stage play to form the screenplay for Regina King’s “One Night in Miami” – he just doesn’t adapt it enough.
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The contextualizing opening scenes, however, are an excellent calling card for King’s talents as a director unafraid of scale and crowds and the recreation of well-known historical events. In a packed auditorium, Clay (Eli Goree), at first floating like a butterfly and stinging like a sledgehammer, is nearly knocked out by British boxer Henry Cooper – he’d go on to win that June ’63 match but the scene cuts cleverly at a moment of ostensible defeat. In the world-famous Copacabana club, Sam Cooke (Odom Jr, doing his own singing and making it look as effortless as, well, Sam Cooke did) makes a disastrous debut in front of an indifferent all-white audience. “I prefer this song when Debbie Reynolds sings it,” murmurs one white lady to her companion, in response to Cooke’s rather pandering choice of “Tammy” as his opening number.
Jim Brown (MVP Aldis Hodge, interpreting rather than imitating his character, and delivering the film’s most magnetic performance as a result) visits a local bigwig in his hometown (a perfectly enraging Beau Bridges) and is first flattered into oblivion and then subjected to casually offhand racism. And Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), watched over assiduously by a saturnine Brother Kareem (Lance Reddick) has a fraught but loving conversation with his wife Betty (a terrific, underused Joaquina Kalukango) about his increasing estrangement from the Nation of Islam, while Betty rails against the Nation’s leader, Elijah Muhammad and his string of affairs with teenage girls.
All four scenarios are framed in Tami Reiker‘s fluid photography and impeccably scored to Terence Blanchard‘s rich, energizing compositions, giving a real sense of scale, from epic to intimate and of mood, from upbeat to despondent. But then we arrive at the Miami hotel, following Clay’s first world title win which Brown, Malcolm and Cooke had all come to town to witness, and even such dynamic craftsmanship can’t quite buoy up an increasingly talky and claustrophobic middle third. Instead the film becomes a series of emblematic confrontations, most pointedly between Cooke and Malcolm X, here portrayed as a constant buzzkill during a night the others all want to spend partying.
The conversation is, of itself, often fascinating, even when it’s at its most didactic. Between Malcom X and Cooke, a deep ideological chasm opens up, between infiltrating the establishment in order to beat the white man at his own game of wealth and power, and being outspoken and unyieldingly rigid to the principles of Black protest. Even more intricately there’s an all-too-brief discussion of colorism between the lighter-skinned Malcolm and the darker-skinned Brown which serves as a welcome, insightful complicating factor in Malcolm’s otherwise rocksteady righteousness. And with Cassius – here portrayed as rather callow and hesitant, despite all the amusing bluster – there’s the dangling question about his incipient conversion to Islam.
So laden with issues, the talk quickly comes to sound less like organic conversation between friends and more like a series of declarative statements designed to remind us, again and again, who these men are and what they mean to history. Still, certain facts are undeniable. Sam Cooke did go on to write “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Cassius Clay did convert to Islam and take the name Muhammad Ali. Jim Brown did retire from the NFL to pursue acting full-time. And in under a month, Malcolm X really did leave the Nation of Islam, before going on a pilgrimage to Mecca and suffering increasing harassment from his erstwhile allies, leading to his assassination less than a year later. But does it increase or decrease our understanding of these events to imagine they can all at least partially be traced back to that one single night? There is something very slightly diminishing about further lionizing these already legendary icons of Black excellence at the expense of all the other people, less famous but no less significant, who fomented and fertilized the discourse during this turbulent moment in the civil rights struggle.
As a work of deep, committed research into real history, that provides a very handy four-way primer on the most famous Black men of their day and the conflicting approaches to Black resistence and liberation that each personified, “One Night in Miami” is an instructive and absorbing watch. But as a film with the potential to do more, push further and explore and maybe even in some ways explode those legacies in order to get at the men underneath them, it feels too timid, too talky, too conceptual in content for being so classical in form.
And King does such an admirable job of establishing a reality outside this tiny little two-room hotel suite, that contains nothing more in the way of a celebratory banquet that two tubs of ice cream – both vanilla – and Cooke’s secretly stashed hipflask, that where a theatrical audience might be able to lose themselves in the to and fro of discussion, the cinematic audience can never quite forget that there’s life and excitement and drama beyond these walls. Having been initially amazed and enthralled that these exact four individuals were ever in a room together, one might spend quite some portion of “One Night In Miami” longing to see them leave it again, to get out into the troubled world they will all, in different ways, change. [B-/C+]
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