Regina King is a real powerhouse actress, someone who has proven herself time and again in countless projects. And, like a lot of actors, she wanted to try her hand at directing, opting to translate the play One Night in Miami to the silver screen. It’s an interesting project, one that could make quite the mark for a burgeoning director to show what she can do.
And now it’s on Amazon Prime, so maybe we can see if Ms. King is as fine a director as she is an actor.
The movie opens with each of the four principal characters experiencing some sort of personal failure. Boxer Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), later Muhammad Ali, loses a bout in England. Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr) bombs at the Copacabana, his dream gig. Football star Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) goes to see a wealthy white man from his old home town only to be hit with a racist slur from the man (Beau Bridges with a cartoonish Southern accent) who doesn’t seem to realize he’s said anything remotely wrong to another human being. And Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is weighing whether or not he wants to stay in the Nation of Islam given what he knows about the founder who brought him to the Muslim faith.
From there, the movie skips ahead to Miami on the night that Clay became the heavyweight champion of the world by defeating Sonny Liston. He’s already friends with the other three, and Malcolm has plans for a celebration. Granted, Malcolm’s idea of celebrating is limited by his faith’s restrictions on things like food and alcohol, and he’s a good family man who wouldn’t dream of bringing girls in even if the Nation didn’t have men watching over him like a hawk, so the celebration is pretty much limited to vanilla ice cream and a lot of talk because Malcolm wants to discuss the fight for civil rights and how he’s bringing Clay into the Nation.
It’s an interesting set-up, with the conflict being restricted to interpersonal disagreements between the different men. Malcolm is a serious man with very idealistic ways of seeing the world. Brown is more quiet and practical and sees their positions as men and not weapons in a war while looking to transition from football to acting. Cooke, who has yet to really make any sort of public suggestions on the fight for civil rights and something of a womanizer, has been working for more economic freedom while letting too much of what Malcolm considers black culture be taken up by whites. And Clay plans to be a boxer forever and seems to be something of a clown.
As such, the biggest fireworks come between Malcolm and Cooke, with Cooke showing how yes, he did “sell” black culture and music to others like the Rolling Stones, but he made sure he got paid in the end, and that was fine by him. By contrast, Malcolm the idealist thinks Bob Dylan has said more about the struggle of being a black man than Cooke has, and that comes before Clay gets the idea that Malcolm might be using him to prop up his own interests.
I realize as I type this that I might have said too much about the plot, but this isn’t a plot-heavy movie. These are historic figures, three of whom are no longer with us, and two of them didn’t live very long. So, it really comes down to the performances of the actors. Hodge probably gives the best performance in what is arguably the least flashy role, Odom makes for a fine Sam Cooke, and while Ben-Adir is not going to replace Denzel Washington in anyone’s mind as the definite portrayal of Malcolm X, he holds his own as an uncertain man trying to get his ideas across. Goree, on the other hand, seems a little cartoonish in his take on Cassius Clay, and it does hurt the movie a little. All things being equal, the movie shows four men influencing each other and their roles and responsibilities to the African American community at a crucial time in our nation’s history. For that alone, this movie is worth a look.
Grade: A-
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