TIFF 2020 Film Review: One Night in Miami
A Powerful Meeting of Minds, Regina King’s One Night in Miami is a Stunner
My TIFF 2020 coverage starts here! Regina King, in her first full-length feature, crafts a dialogue-driven triumph grounded by evocative performances, powerful debate, and a gripping timeliness. Following four Black icons of the 20th Century as they navigate the winds of change in a semi-fictional meeting of the minds, One Night in Miami hews close to its stage play roots, translating Kemp Powers’ theater into rousing, intimate cinema. Minor spoilers ahead…
With back to back Emmys for American Crime and Seven Seconds, an Academy Award for If Beale Street Could Talk, and a whirlwind stint on HBO’s Watchmen, celebrated actress and filmmaker Regina King is having quite a career renaissance. That renaissance continues with her buzzed-about feature-length directorial debut, One Night in Miami, which saw its premiere at both Venice Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival last week. Based upon the stage play by Kemp Powers - who also pens the film’s screenplay - Miami weaves a fictional extrapolation of the real-life meeting among Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom, Jr.) on the eve of Clay’s momentous boxing victory over Sonny Liston in 1964. Anchored by four incredible performances, the film breathes renewed life into these powerful historical figures; with stirring human drama and a sobering meditation on the weight of Black celebrity, One Night in Miami is a knockout that deserves every bit of its praise.
Spending the opening 19 minutes before its title card to introduce our quartet, One Night in Miami sees each of its characters at a crossroads in 1963: Malcolm X struggles to reconcile his place in the civil rights movement with his growing disillusionment of the Nation of Islam leadership, escalating his conflict with Elijah Muhammad; Jim Brown’s superstar NFL status is hobbled by not-so-thinly-veiled racism - a visit to a “friend” (Beau Bridges) results in an exchange of pleasantries, but those pleasantries only extend as far as the threshold of the white man’s door; Cassius Clay, before he was known as Muhammad Ali, soars to the apex of his career while also grappling with his burgeoning Muslim faith; and the confident crooner Sam Cooke bombs in front of his white audience at the Copacabana, a jolting reminder that success as a Black man often comes with a short ceiling.
“…with stirring human drama and a sobering meditation on the weight of Black celebrity, One Night in Miami is a knockout that deserves every bit of its praise.”
It takes a little awkward finagling to set the stage, but once these four legends gather to celebrate Cassius Clay’s new title as heavyweight boxing champion of the world, One Night in Miami becomes dialogue-powered dynamite ignited by four phenomenal performances. We may never know what actually transpired at this fateful meeting, and none of the actors look particularly like their real-world counterparts, but Miami aims for evocation, not facsimile - from Clay’s cocksure braggadocio, to Malcolm X’s blazing passion, to Brown’s steely confidence, to Cooke’s unique vocal cadence, there’s an encapsulation of essence that just feels like truth. And with these performances, the roots of Kemp Powers’ stage play are fully transparent under Regina King’s deft direction: Resisting the temptation of portraying these four larger-than-life icons through a lens of garish grandeur, the film instead opts to get right into the nitty gritty of a spirited discourse among friends.
Within the walls of the motel room, no stone of discussion is left unturned: religion, freedom, colorism, the weight of the Black experience and the responsibility of Black celebrity are all threads pulled for conversation. And while these individuals consider each other friends, it isn’t all sunshine and unity - in the film’s most gripping throughline, Malcolm X lays into Sam Cooke for his perceived pandering to white America, accusing Cooke’s fame and wealth of warping his priorities and perspective. Kingsley Ben-Adir is simply stunning as Malcolm X, capturing a much more sensitive and tender side of the firebrand civil rights leader rarely seen in his other depictions, while somehow still maintaining fidelity to the portrait that history has painted.
As an adaptation of theater, One Night in Miami lives by its cast’s electric chemistry. Expertly deconstructing legend and public perception, Goree, Hodge, Ben-Adir, and Odom, Jr. run the utterly convincing gamut of frustration, joy, anger, and passion through their interactions. And in the end, even with heated exchanges and clashing egos, One Night in Miami is ultimately about reconciliation and solidarity in the fight for Black lives. We rarely witness these winds of change outside the sterility of history books, archival footage, and biopics, so it’s a testament to these performances that these seemingly unshakable monoliths are given human context, aided by Powers’ prescient words and King’s seamless direction.
