An intriguing study of race and celebrity – 1960s style
One Night in Miami TBC Cert, 110 min ★★★★★
Dir Regina King
Starring Kingsley Ben-adir, Aldis Hodge, Leslie Odom Jr, Eli Goree
It was in a humble Florida hotel room on February 25 1964, just as the civil rights movement was arriving at a crossroads, that four very different paths through black American public life converged.
Earlier that day, the boxer Cassius Clay – who would soon change his name to Muhammad Ali – won the world heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston at the age of 22, and the celebration was as low-key as the victory itself had been seismic. Rather than hitting the town, he spent the evening with three friends, and three fellow black icons in the making: the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, the recording artist Sam Cooke, and the American footballer Jim Brown, who at the time was branching out into Hollywood. There is no record of what these men spoke about that evening, but their meeting has obvious and enormous fly-on-the-wall appeal, which was capitalised on by Kemp Powers’s 2013 single-act play One Night in Miami, which imagined how the foursome’s conversations might have run. Seven years later, the actress Regina King has directed this handsome and engaging screen version, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last night.
As with most play-to-film conversions, additional material has been provided to flesh out the scenario and generally make the viewing experience more cinematic. (The screenplay was expanded by Powers from his original script.) The four leads are introduced in turn: Clay (Eli Goree) at a bout with Henry Cooper in London the previous June; Cooke (the Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr) stumbling through a disastrous set at a whites-only venue; Brown (Aldis Hodge) discovering the limits of a benefactor’s racial tolerance; and Malcolm X (Britain’s Kingsley Ben-adir) sharing what feels like a rare domestic moment with his wife.
The scenes are useful in a beginner’s guide sense, but largely feel like optional extras, and it’s only when the quartet comes together that
Meeting of minds: the film imagines a discussion between four icons the film begins to cook. With no alcohol in sight and just two cartons of vanilla ice cream in the freezer, the celebratory chatter soon turns to weightier topics. Powers’s screenplay is essentially a four-way Socratic dialogue on what it means to be black in public in America, and his characters attack the subject from all angles.
Clay is the showman, Brown the athlete, Cooke the artist, and Malcolm X the community leader, and the film’s dramatic intrigue stems from the various ways in which their perspectives align and clash.
Malcolm X, for instance, thinks Cooke’s lyrics are vapidly apolitical, then criticises white rock musicians’ appropriation of black rhythm and blues. Ah, counters Cooke: but when the Rolling Stones play a Bobby Womack song, Bobby Womack makes a fortune from a white audience. And as for the lyrics, wait until he hears Cooke’s new one – which turns out to be the future civil rights anthem A Change is Gonna Come, and is deployed with poignancy and irony in the film’s closing sequence.
Ben-adir makes the biggest impression: the London-born actor will play Barack Obama in the forthcoming miniseries The Comey Rule, and there is something unquestionably Obama-esque about his Malcolm X, with his angular body language, cool poise and probing gaze. Not that you have to look hard for modern-day resonances in King’s film: this half-century-old discussion of race, celebrity and activism in the United States often feels as if it could have taken place last week.
UK release date TBC