One Night in Miami . . .: In the Room

Similar dynamics were in the air when Powers’s stage play One Night in Miami . . . premiered in Los Angeles in 2013, with its informed speculations of what had happened that eponymous night almost a half century before. That same year, six months after a Black man was sworn in for his second term as president of the United States, a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman, a twenty-nine-year-old former neighborhood-watch coordinator charged with murdering an unarmed Black teenager named Trayvon Martin. That case, along with others involving similar deaths of unarmed Black people from excessive police force, set off a new wave of outrage and activism against racial inequality and injustice.

By the time King’s filmed adaptation of One Night in Miami . . . was released in 2020—the most tumultuous, divisive year of the new century—such names as those of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd had joined Martin’s and so many others’ as unarmed Black victims of unwarranted force. While those victims, especially Floyd, aroused protests involving people of many ages, races, and religious backgrounds, there had also been, in the four years of the Donald Trump administration that followed Barack Obama’s, a resurgence in white nationalism. As in the 1960s, Americans were once again compelled to engage with renewed intensity the imperatives of what could and should be done to once and for all purge their nation from the lingering legacy of its original sin. What is to be done? And how?

Do we go back in time to ask Malcolm, Sam, Jim, and the artist soon to become Muhammad Ali? Did they ask the same questions of themselves on that night? Again, we don’t know. But the movie gives us plenty of space to imagine—and, of course, to ask still more questions.

ATTALLAH, MALCOLM X’S DAUGHTER: Where are you?

It’s the middle of the night in South Florida, and, in a lone telephone booth near a motel parking lot, a father speaks softly with his five-year-old daughter, who is back in their living room over a thousand miles away in Queens, New York. If you didn’t already know this was Malcolm X, you might take him for just another bespectacled, diffident, thirtyish business traveler reaching out for familiarity and comfort from remote, uneasy surroundings.

So where is Attallah’s daddy on this February night? Far from home, for sure. But Malcolm (Kingsley Ben-Adir) also seems at once to be set adrift and swept up by the fast-forwarding grip of events. He is at odds with the Nation of Islam, the separatist Muslim sect that changed his life while he was in prison and eventually made him globally renowned and feared. Disillusioned and hurt by the increasing constraints placed on his public speaking by the Nation’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm feels himself pulling away from the organization at the very point when he has obtained a prized convert to its cause: the freshly minted heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (Eli Goree).

Earlier in the film, at the start of the same evening, Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) is first to arrive for what’s supposed to be a party, or at least the beginning of one, at the Hampton House Motel, situated in Miami’s predominantly Black Brownsville section, and serving as a refuge for African American travelers still uneasily making their way through a slowly desegregating Deep South. With Malcolm, Cassius, and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) expected to arrive soon, Sam is anticipating a victory celebration to match the magnitude of the moment. But this room isn’t at all like the brighter, bigger one over at Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau, where he’s staying with his wife, Barbara (Nicolette Robinson). After Sam inspects the furniture, runs his hands over the bedcovers, and gazes at the light fixtures, he can only mutter, “It’s a damn dump.” At least it’s cozier than the Copacabana in New York, where, not long ago, Sam attempted to broaden his appeal beyond the soul-music circuit to an older, whiter nightclub clientele, with dismal results.

Though these and other such scenes that isolate Malcolm, Sam, and the others exist along the periphery of the movie’s core—the lively and at times volatile discourse among its four principals—they also exemplify how deftly both King and Powers open up the tightly contained physical setting of the original play; words express character, actions define it. The movie’s prelude, depicting Clay’s near loss the year before the Liston bout to British boxer Henry Cooper, shows how flamboyance may easily teeter toward recklessness. Here and throughout the movie, Goree skillfully evokes both Clay’s blend of power and agility, in and out of the ring, and that rasping, rapid-fire verbal patter that would over the years to come seduce as much as shock the world. But what raises the performance above mimicry is the way Goree summons from beneath the champ’s “I’m so pretty” bravado sustained flashes of his raw intellect and instinctual resistance to whatever straitjacket white society tries to fasten over his titleholder’s belt. Whatever changes are in the air for Black progress in early 1964, Cassius suggests at one point that they “ain’t about civil rights!” Rather, he says, they’re about power, by which he means “a world where we’re safe to be ourselves. To look like we want. To think like we want. Without having to answer to anybody for it. And after all we put in, don’t Black folks deserve that much?”

Jim Brown thinks so, even if he has perhaps a greater consensus of fans, in awe of what he has been able to do Sunday after Sunday to power his way through pro football’s most formidable defenses. Hodge’s portrayal of the man whom NFL Films once declared “the player of the millennium” is every bit as attentive to Brown’s well-known physical and verbal characteristics as Goree’s Clay: the low tones and soft rumbling of Brown’s voice; his coiled, catlike swagger; and his unflappable demeanor, impervious to others’ intimidation. He seems the most physically and emotionally grounded of this quartet. Yet in an early sequence, he is knocked for a loop. During a stop Jim makes on his native St. Simons Island in Georgia on his way to provide broadcast commentary on the Clay-Liston bout, an older white man named Carlton (Beau Bridges) welcomes Jim, whom he knew as a child, to the front porch of his mansion. At first, Carlton is all smiles and approbation, congratulating Jim on his just-completed 1963 season, during which he achieved a single-season rushing record of 1,863 yards. But when Carlton is reminded by his daughter that he needs to move some heavy furniture indoors, and Jim offers to help, Carlton assures him it’s not necessary, adding as he walks inside, “You know we don’t allow niggers in the house.” Hodge’s Jim is immobilized at the screen door by this send-off. But what registers on his face is neither surprise nor anger but more a kind of watchful resignation, a wary (and weary) acknowledgment of what for him is business as usual.

Yet later in the movie, alone with Malcolm, Jim opens up about his folk-hero status in a way that suggests he’s still thinking about that front-porch encounter: “I ain’t no damn hero to [white people]. No . . . You see, Malcolm, some white folks just cannot wait to pat themselves on the back for not being cruel to us. Like we should be singing hosannas just because they found the kindness in their hearts to almost treat us like real human beings. I mean, do you expect a dog to give you a medal for not kicking it that day? I hate those motherfuckers more than the rednecks who just put it all out there. And I’ll be damned if I ever forget what they really think of me.” 

Testaments like this are what give One Night in Miami . . . its energy and its resonance. It’s not so important to know for sure whether Brown made this exact disclosure to Malcolm X almost sixty years ago. What matters is that, through Powers’s acumen when it comes to personality and through his keen sense of history, we accept the plausibility of what these four men, each at his own personal crossroads, say in that room on that night.

SAM COOKE: Everybody talks about wantin’ a piece of the pie. Well, I don’t. I want the whole damn recipe.

While the men are shown to be vulnerable on their own, as a group they are most comfortable and least guarded. So the main event of One Night in Miami . . . arrives when Sam, Jim, Cassius, and Malcolm, in varying stages of exuberance, are present and accounted for in Room 254. It is inside the Hampton House suite that King’s directorial skills can be best appreciated, since it is challenging and risky to try to make an absorbing movie using mostly interiors. In an IndieWire interview with Anne Thompson, King—who collected her first directing credits in series television, with episodes from shows such as Scandal, This Is Us, and Insecure—said she sought a color scheme similar to what Barry Jenkins achieved in If Beale Street Could Talk, the 2018 adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel for which King won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. One Night in Miami . . . “was stylized in the way the blues and the reds and the greens were saturated,” she said, and credited some of the film’s blue and gold shadings to the sixties nighttime backstreet look of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and to twentieth-century painter Jacob Lawrence’s expressive and sometimes stark depictions of Black American life.

But it is in the composure and intensity of the performances that one can find King’s most indelible influence as a director, as those qualities are among her primary assets as an actor. She has cultivated a varied career spanning almost forty years, starting at age fourteen in 1985 as the studious but romantic Brenda Jenkins on the TV sitcom 227, which ran till 1990, and appearing afterward in a trio of films (Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice, Higher Learning) directed by the late John Singleton. In an eclectic array of roles since—ranging from the mercurial, star-crossed “Raelette” Margie Hendrix in Ray (2004) to her Emmy-winning roles in two seasons of American Crime—King has solidified a reputation for playing self-possessed women with fiercely protected centers of gravity, and her formidable poise in front of a camera comes through in her performance behind it.

Leslie Odom Jr.’s enactment of Sam is worth noting here, not just for the almost eerie way his sweet, agile, melisma-coated singing voice resembles the genuine article, but also for the subtlety with which he contains his exasperation at Malcolm’s grilling and the frustration of wishing, as he confesses to Jim he does, that he had written Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the politically engaged song to which Malcolm unfavorably compares Sam’s music. (Odom’s acerbic yet touching blend of anxious calculation and thwarted aspiration strongly evokes his breakout performance as Aaron Burr in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 Broadway hit musical Hamilton.) Sam confides that he has been working on his own anthem for the movement, and, as he is shown premiering the song on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show at the movie’s climax, the music and lyrics of “A Change Is Gonna Come” follow the other three men in their separate and distinct destinies: Malcolm and his family burned out of their house after he leaves the Nation of Islam, Cassius Clay renamed among members of that same Nation as Muhammad Ali, and Jim Brown announcing his retirement from the Cleveland Browns on the London set of The Dirty Dozen.

CASSIUS: We have to be there for each other.

SAM: Why?

CASSIUS: Because ain’t nobody else understands what it’s like bein’ one of us. Except us.

SAM: One of us?

CASSIUS: You know. Young. Black. Righteous. Famous. Unapologetic.

The movie tells us at the very end that Malcolm X would be murdered, on the stage of the Audubon Ballroom in New York, on February 21, 1965, just less than a year after that night in Miami. Curiously, it does not disclose that Sam Cooke was himself shot and killed two and a half months before that by a motel clerk in Los Angeles. Nor does it tell the audience of the tribulations Muhammad Ali would face in 1967 for refusing military induction at the height of the Vietnam War on religious grounds, thus compelling boxing’s commissars to strip him of his heavyweight title and ban him from the sport at what would have been his physical and professional peak.

Then again, maybe it’s just as well the long-term history isn’t emphasized in One Night in Miami . . ., where the destinies of each man, his people, and his country can be sensed throughout in the shadows on the walls and those passing over their faces.