Review: One Night In Miami

Image courtesy of Amazon Studios.

In the past month, I've seen two films based on acclaimed stage productions - first, August Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and, this week, Kemp Powers's "One Night in Miami." Although both movies are good, the latter - which is the directorial debut of Regina King - is the one that works slightly better as a movie.

While "Ma Rainey" was an acting showcase and a good film, it felt slightly stagey, whereas King's "Miami" does a better job of translating from the stage to the screen and, as a result, it feels more cinematic. Although King's film also - since it was first a play - relies mostly on dialogue to move its narrative forward, it involves more camera movement and variety of location.

The film - and Kemp's play - bears some similarity to Terry Johnson's play and Nicolas Roeg's experimental movie adaptation of "Insignificance," a 1985 film that imagined an alternate history during which Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joseph McCarthy and Joe DiMaggio were stuck in a hotel room together.

In "Miami," four iconic Black figures of the mid-1960s - Malcolm X (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge, whose vocal imitation and cadences of the football legend and Blaxploitation actor are spot on) and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) - wind up in a hotel room after Clay, who has yet to change his name to Muhammad Ali, defeats Sonny Liston during a boxing match in Miami in 1964.

Malcolm X, who would be assassinated about one year later, has Clay's future on his mind, acting as a spiritual guide for the boxer, and hoping that he will officially join the Nation of Islam, and then flee it with the Civil Rights leader when he decides to start his own organization. Cooke is coming off a flop of a performance at a famed British music hall, and gets prodded by Malcolm X for primarily writing love songs, although he's inspired to write his Civil Rights anthem "A Change is Gonna Come" during the course of the picture.

Brown's role in the story is slightly more nebulous - although after making the case to Malcolm X that Cooke is the freest of the four due to his owning his own record company, we see his character follow a similar path by deciding to leave the NFL to pursue an acting career. However, there's a powerful moment early in the film during which he visits an aging white man played by Beau Bridges, who appears to be some sort of mentor or bigwig in Brown's hometown. After praising Brown's athletic performance and calling him a tribute to the town, he nonchalantly tells Brown that he won't invite him into his house because, you guessed it, he's Black. Despite being a "hero" to Americans, he is still subjected to their casual racism.

For starters, you have to admire the four lead actors - all of whom are quite good - for taking on such iconic roles, especially considering the fact that Malcolm X has already been portrayed by Denzel Washington in a landmark performance, while Will Smith did a solid job already of portraying Ali.

During the course of the evening, the four men discuss race in 1960s America, how they believe they are contributing to the cause of civil rights and the possibility of life changes, from careers to actual names in Ali's case. The men bicker, but there's an obvious love and admiration among them for each other that is best exemplified when Malcolm X regales them with a story of how Cooke - these two men argue more than any other of the four - once brought down the house at a concert when the sound equipment failed. 

The squabbles between them primarily revolve around their roles in American society - Malcolm X especially recognizes that his three friends aren't just athletes and a musician, but that their success and national recognition give them a voice that can be used to advocate for change. 

So, while the setup of "One Night in Miami" is one that's been seen before, it gets a lot of mileage out of its substance. It's also well written and acted, and King shows assurance behind the camera in her directing debut. Among stage-to-screen adaptations of recent years - and there have been more than a few - this is one that does a very good job of translating the confines of a play into an experience that feels cinematic.