Historical fiction

Four of the most famous black men in America spend an evening together in the middle of the turbulent civil rights movement. What would they say, and how would they influence each other? Playwright Kemp Powers imagines the answers to these questions in his play One Night in Miami, and director Regina King brings the story to the screen in the Amazon film of the same name.

Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) has just defeated Sonny Liston in a dramatic 1964 boxing match. Clay dances, taunts, and beams as he pommels Liston physically and psychologically. “I am the greatest!” shouts the new heavyweight champion. Ringside spectators Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), football great Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), and singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) hustle back to Malcolm X’s hotel room for what Brown and Cooke hope will be a wild victory party.

Malcolm X has something much more subdued in mind: no big crowd, no alcohol, no girls—just the four of them and a lot of talk. Director King worked hard to keep the movie from looking too much like a play, so the “action” moves from hotel room to a parking lot to a liquor store to the hotel roof. The acting is good, but there’s no disguising the film’s roots on the stage. King portrays what real conversations between these four might have been like—with plenty of vulgar and coarse language and occasional blasphemy, which gets the film an R rating.

The movie offers a sympathetic depiction of Malcolm X as a family man who passionately pleads with Cooke, Clay, and Brown to use their fame and prominence to help bring about racial equality. Not surprisingly, it does not deal with some of the ugly teachings of the Nation of Islam, which the real-life Malcolm X promoted vigorously from the early 1950s until he left the group in 1964. The Nation of Islam claimed that white people are devils, black people are superior to whites, and marriage between people of different races is wrong. The real Malcolm X once called Martin Luther King Jr. a “chump” and criticized the nonviolent strategy of the mainstream civil rights movement.

Playwright Powers hints that Malcolm X’s urgings influenced how his three companions used their fame for the civil rights cause. On The Tonight Show, Sam Cooke performs his civil rights protest song “A Change Is Gonna Come,” quite different from the lightweight love songs that Malcolm X criticized in Miami. Cassius Clay announces his conversion to Islam and a name change to Muhammad Ali.

Some viewers will emphasize how One Night in Miami omits so much context that it is more like fantasy than a helpful imagining of history. Others will see the film as a window into different strains of the black experience.