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Review: “One Night in Miami”
The dialogue-driven account of four famous friends and their night together tackles pivotal issues of race from an entertaining and insightful angle.
Regina King’s One Night in Miami, adapted by Kemp Powers from his own stage play, is a timely and anecdotal addendum to the contemporary swath of conversations about what it means for a Black person to hold a platform. It is impossible to separate the content of this film, which takes place on the night of February 25th, 1964, from the attritional state of racial justice in 2021, though King thankfully allows us to make that connection for ourselves. We don’t need to be told how similar questions are being asked fifty years after the story takes place — the conversations in the film ring familiar enough.
The main characters of Powers’ historical drama are titans of 1960s America: Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir). The four were actually friends, and the night dramatized in the film, spent mostly inside Malcolm’s motel suite after Clay’s bludgeoning of Sonny Liston in the Miami Convention Center, actually occurred in one form or another. In the fictionalized version, Brown and Cooke arrive at the motel expecting a night alongside alcohol and…