One Night in Miami is a confident directorial debut from Oscar- and multiple Emmy-winning Regina King.
Its assuredness easily gives the impression that it was made by someone with more behind-the-camera experience.
Dynamic, thoughtful and exquisitely performed, One Night in Miami is interested in the one thing everyone wants and don’t know what to do with it when they have it, power.
Adapted by Kemp Powers from his own screenplay, the film is a fictionalised telling of the night Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) beat Sonny Liston in a title fight few thought he would win.
Revelling in the victory afterwards, Ali (Eli Goree) and his friends Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) gather in a hotel room where their relationships will be tested as they grapple with their own high profiles and what responsibilities they have in the civil rights struggle.
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One Night in Miami is a film with a strong perspective on the pressures on successful black Americans in 1964 – Ali as an athlete, Cooke as a chart-topping singer, Brown as a football champion and Malcolm X as an activist.
The specific moment in time – early 1964 – was a tumultuous one for the men involved, on the eve of Malcolm X’s break with the Nation of Islam, immediately apparent in the tenuous relationship he has with his security detail who seem more like his keepers.
At the centre of this transfixing film is the tension between Malcolm X and Cooke. Malcolm believes Cooke should use his influence to confrontingly further the revolution while Cooke believes that simply by being successful – and sharing that wealth with other black people – is leadership.
By the end of the night, words will be exchanged but so will ideas and perspectives, leading each person to form a deeper view of the world and their place in it.
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One Night in Miami makes clear that to even be in possession of the power they have, these four men had to be young, black and talented. That power is never given, it’s something they had to take, and even when they have it, they don’t just get to keep it because they deserve it.
It’s always equivocal. It doesn’t matter if Jim Brown has championship trophies and a record, because even if he has a white man’s admiration, it doesn’t mean he has their respect. A glass of lemonade and some flowery words doesn’t get him pass the threshold.
In the same way that the Copacabana audience who laughs at a white comedian’s lame jokes walks out of Cooke’s performance because they preferred how Debbie Reynolds covered the song he’s singing.
With the power they do have, comes safety – not absolute safety, knowing what we know about the next few years, and then the decades following. But, certainly, more than that is afforded black Americans who don’t have the success of these four men.
Their talent serves as an armour, but as Brown puts it in the film, they are just gladiators, mere champions to entertain the rulers sitting high in their amphitheatre boxes.
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The ideas in the film about power and position in a world that strives to deny it to them, and which are so persuasively and effectively expressed in Kemp’s writing, is provocative and resonant, ringing as loudly now as it did six decades earlier.
It’s why One Night in Miami feels so contemporary, even among the historical figures and the modernist furniture of its staging.
But that feeling of urgency is also an indictment. How can it be that the same conversation – those pleas to be seen and valued as human – are still relevant almost 60 years later?
King is a steady hand and has an innate understanding of how to best use Kemp’s words to bring out stunning performances from her cast, especially from Ben-Adir and Odom Jr, whose every syllable strikes you right in your soul.
There’s Shakespearean quality to One Night in Miami, wrestling with grand ideas about the complexities of the human experiences through these flawed but noble characters.
Rating: 4/5
One Night in Miami is streaming on Amazon Prime Video
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