Review: One Night in Miami Is a Rousing Look at a Friendship Between Icons

The film understands how its major cultural figures navigated a political minefield, while never taking its eyes off of them as people.

One Night in Miami
Photo: Amazon Studios

Regina King’s One Night in Miami, an adaptation of Kemp Powers’s one-act play of the same name, is a fictional account of the events of February 25, 1964, the night that 22-year-old Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston to become the world boxing champion. The story is set in the aftermath of their first bout, as Clay (Eli Goree), on the eve of transforming into Muhammad Ali, celebrates back at his hotel with N.F.L. fullback Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), and Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir).

The film gets off to a wobbly start, as the prologue scenes penned by Powers feel like obvious attempts to “open up” the play for the screen. The scenes merely belabor the professional and private struggles that each of these men face and will come to the fore more naturally as the story progresses. For one, the scene in which Clay nearly loses to white boxer Henry Cooper in 1963 simply exists to illustrate the former’s propensity for showboating and how it almost gets the better of him. The only sequence during this stretch with any real resonance is one in which Brown returns to his hometown in Georgia and has a pleasant conversation with an admiring white man (Beau Bridges) that ends in a shocking display of racism.

The film only finds its groove when the story catches up to the original start of Powers’s play. Giving her actors ample space to play off of each other, King lets the men develop their characters more subtly and without the crutch of narrative stimuli. Especially of note is the way Goree captures Clay’s gigawatt charisma as he bounces around the room in his state of post-fight euphoria, trash-talking until he pauses in front of a mirror for so long that the other men fear something is wrong, at which point Clay says, “Oh my goodness, I’m so pretty!”

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Clay’s youthful braggadocio contrasts sharply with Brown’s laconicism, the product of being older and knowing when to hold his tongue in public. Hodge plays Brown as a voice of reason, so calming that despite being a full decade younger than Malcolm X, he seems like the oldest man in the room. As Clay and Cooke bicker over the former’s announcement of his intention to convert to Islam, Brown gently mediates in Clay’s favor, which causes Cooke to sarcastically ask why he doesn’t also convert. Brown asks, “Have you tasted my grandmother’s pork chops,” with such a disarming deadpan that even Malcolm bursts into laughter.

Malcolm X, though, is the true center of this small ensemble, and Ben-Adir’s performance wrests the man from any attempts to simplify him into a hero or villain. The Malcolm X of One Night in Miami is strident, yes, even with his friends, but Ben-Adir emphasizes the firebrand’s soulfulness when Malcolm speaks of his tenderness for his family, and with subtle flashes of boyish eagerness in moments of camaraderie with the other men. Above all, the actor injects Malcolm’s sermonizing with a palpable sense of earnestness that orients his revolutionary invective around a core of moral urgency. This isn’t a man going out of his way to say the most offensive thing he can think of, but someone who suspects that his time on this planet is short and is desperate to move the needle of a vicious, brutal society before he goes.

That desire comes to a head in the film’s second half, which is given over to a lengthy debate prompted by Malcolm referring to his famous friends as “weapons” in promoting the cause of black people and urging them to live model lives and embrace activist rhetoric. This gradually escalates into an argument when Malcolm singles out Cooke for caring too much about winning over the white world by penning apolitical fluff songs while a “white kid from the Midwest” like Bob Dylan can so eloquently capture the culture without having any experience with racism. Cooke fires back by pointing out how much artistic freedom he’s managed to secure not only for himself, but for the black artists he promotes. Laying out all of the ways his methods have enriched himself and others, Cooke angrily retorts, “Everybody talks about how they want a piece of the pie. Well I don’t. I want the goddamned recipe.”

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The argument and its aftershocks touch on topics ranging from code-switching to colorism to the responsibility of fame, and every time the film runs the risk of drifting into on-the-nose didacticism, it finds a way to cool off and reorient its focus on its characters’ interpersonal dynamics. That’s most keenly felt when Ali becomes uncharacteristically shy as Malcolm and Cooke bicker, clearly upset that the latter is being picked on but unable to bring himself to contradict his mentor. Brown mediates where he can but also needs to escape to the bathroom at one moment just to collect himself when he gets too upset, the camera holding his face in close-up as he silently does breathing exercises to calm his nerves.

As much as One Night in Miami seeks to understand how such major cultural figures navigated a political minefield (and thus impart those lessons onto a current generation also faced with hard questions about how to wield their celebrity), it nonetheless never takes its eyes off of its characters as people. As they fight and reconcile and reminisce, it’s impossible not to think about the fact that in less than a year, two of the men will be dead, and only Ali will still be on an upward career trajectory. That foreknowledge lends a grim sadness to the film, one that makes its quiet moments of connection between friends feel all the more urgent.

Score: 
 Cast: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, Leslie Odom Jr., Joaquina Kalukango, Nicolette Robinson, Beau Bridges, Lance Reddick, Christian Magby, Michael Imperioli, Emily Bridges, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., Derek Roberts, Jerome A. Wilson, Jeremy Pope  Director: Regina King  Screenwriter: Kemp Powers  Distributor: Amazon Studios  Running Time: 114 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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