Film review

Regina King (2020)

Every now and then, you see a young actor in a minor television role and think:  if there’s any justice they must go on to bigger things.  It’s not exactly a matter of the performance being far better than the role deserves but the actors concerned, without grandstanding, give their character more than could reasonably be expected.  I’ve written elsewhere about ‘talent-spotting’ Daniel Kaluuya in the Parking Pataweyo sketches in Harry and Paul a decade back.  A few years later, I kept noticing the discreet presence of Kingsley Ben-Adir as Marcus, the forensic pathologist in ITV’s (reliably good) crime drama Vera.  (There’ve been a few different pathologists over the course of the ten series so far; Marcus was in four of them.)  Watching Vera repeats the other month, I was struck again by Ben-Adir and looked on IMDb to see what he’d had been doing since.  There was plenty of television work on both sides of the Atlantic, including several series of Peaky Blinders (which I’ve never seen); a few credits, in seemingly small parts, in films I’d not heard of; and an upcoming cinema feature, One Night in Miami, in which Ben-Adir would be playing Malcolm X.

Regina King has directed episodes of various US TV shows in recent years but this is her film directing debut.  The movie screened at the Venice and Toronto festivals last month, and was an eleventh-hour addition to this month’s London Film Festival, where I saw it.  Kent Powers’s screenplay is adapted from his own stage play, first produced in Los Angeles in 2013 (and, in Europe, at the Donmar Warehouse three years later).  One Night in Miami is a speculative account of a remarkable actual event.  On 25 February 1964, Cassius Clay (as he still was, though not for much longer) surprised everyone – perhaps even himself – by taking the World Heavyweight Championship from Sonny Liston, in a title fight at Miami Beach.  Afterwards, Clay went to the nearby Hampton Hotel, a motel that catered for Black[1] celebrities.  He met up there with three friends – Malcolm X, the American football star Jim Brown and the singer-composer-music-producer Sam Cooke.  Kent Powers imagines the conversation of the four men, all in the public eye, each a different example of a high-achieving African American.

King and Powers face the familiar challenge arising from filming a play whose action takes place on a single set and in more or less real time.  On stage, there’d be no problem accepting One Night in Miami‘s hotel room as the forum for delineating character and issues through a continuing debate:  an audience implicitly accepts that’s what they’ve come to the theatre to see and hear.  Things are more complicated when this kind of material is translated to the screen.  Film-makers have to decide whether to stay in the same location throughout or take the action elsewhere.  The former approach risks criticism that the drama is no more than a filmed record of a stage production.  The latter approach risks dramatic dilution.

The makers of One Night in Miami opt for the usual uneasy compromise – opening out, though with the lion’s share of screen time given to what’s essentially the stage set.  Giving film viewers access to the world outside the world of a theatre play can often draw attention to the essential contrivance of the piece.  We may wonder why the characters stay put as long as they do – especially if, early on, they have itchy feet, which is the case here.  Powers’s foursome is meant to be celebrating.  Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr) want to party with girls and alcohol – Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), too, though he’s on the verge of publicly converting to Islam.  Unfortunately for all three, Malcolm X, Clay’s spiritual mentor, is in charge of the refreshments:  vanilla ice cream and soft drinks only.

It’s a good fifteen minutes into the film before the quartet even reaches the hotel.  King’s prelude – introductory episodes that focus on the four principals in turn – is decidedly too long, even though the episodes successively improve.  The opener – a summary of Clay’s fight against Henry Cooper in London in June 1963 – is shaky.  The minor characters – the ringside commentators and Clay’s entourage, headed by Angelo Dundee (Michael Imperioli) – are cartoonish; the episode ends with Cooper’s famous (to British viewers) flooring of Clay at the end of the fourth round.  If you didn’t already know better, you’d infer that was how the fight ended.  The staging of Sam Cooke’s unfortunate debut at the Copacabana club in New York is also broadly done.  The audience’s racist antipathy to Cooke is overstressed.

Racism comes through more trenchantly as a sting in the tail to Jim Brown’s visit to the home, on St Simons Island, Georgia, of Mr Carlton, an affable, elderly white neighbour (Beau Bridges), who stresses the local community’s pride in Brown’s footballing prowess.  Mr Carlton draws their front porch meeting to a close by explaining, still with a smile on his face, that he’d never ‘allow a n***** inside my house’.  Malcolm X first appears as a figure on a television screen, watched by his wife, Betty Shabazz (Joaquina Kalunkango), as she anxiously awaits her husband’s return home.  When he comes in, the conversation quickly turns from the couple’s children to the bad blood between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad within the Nation of Islam.  This episode – economically contrasting the public speaker and family man, and hinting at the strain on Malcolm’s personal life of his political activism – is much the best of the four.

Other scenes outside the hotel are essentially filler, including a standard-issue description of the Clay-Liston fight, with Brown, Cooke and Malcolm all ringside at the Miami Beach Convention Hall.  But once Regina King and her DP Tami Reiker move inside the Hampton, the narrative acquires rhythm and urgency.  King seems to find in the claustrophobic setting an expression of the African-American dilemma of the time – a hunger for self-assertion that seems bound to be achieved on white society’s terms.  Jim Brown, in the twilight of his football career, is embarking instead on a Hollywood one, playing racial stereotypes.  The issues are conveyed most strongly, though, in arguments between Malcolm X and Sam Cooke.  When Malcolm accuses him of pandering to white audiences, Cooke points out that his own record label has launched the careers of Black artists who wouldn’t otherwise have broken through; that white cover versions of Black songs generates royalties – Cooke cites the Rolling Stones’s cover of Bobby Womack’s ‘It’s All Over Now’ as an example – which bolster their composers’ commercial clout and independence.

Although the men often debate as a quartet, there are also dialogues involving pairs or trios.  Each actor takes his turn in the spotlight, and gets a break from the action.  In other words, you’re always aware that One Night in Miami is a sensibly-constructed stage four-hander but King and her actors develop real flow and momentum, interrupted only by the occasional excursions beyond the hotel room.  The best use made of the external world comes from within the room.  When Malcolm goes outside to call Betty from a phone box he notices dodgy-looking white men skulking in the shadows.  They’re still there when he looks out through windows a couple of times subsequently.  But the main value of the setting is that it offers a chance to explore the personality of celebrities behind closed doors.

This aspect of the material naturally depends a lot on how familiar the viewer is beforehand with the celebrity’s public face.  I know Sam Cooke only as a singing voice, and next to nothing about Jim Brown; for me, there was scope only for ‘privatising’ Cassius Clay and, to a lesser extent, Malcolm X.  (Both have been the subject of earlier film dramas but I’ve not seen Michael Mann’s Ali (2001) and didn’t find memories of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X obscuring the view of King’s picture.)  Clay’s conversion to Islam is used to intensify the drama.  In a middle-of-the-night press conference, he announces his new identity, with Malcolm standing at his side.  This invention has an ironic charge:  Malcolm’s deep reservations about the state of the Nation of Islam are also made clear, and the rift between him and Muhammad Ali was imminent[2].  It’s a bit of a struggle throughout to accept that, on this night of sporting triumph, Clay is willing to tolerate the postponement of celebrations in favour of searching cultural debate.  But King reduces this problem by emphasising the boxer’s relative youth:  he’d only just turned twenty-two.  Jim Brown was two days off his twenty-eighth birthday, Sam Cooke thirty-three and Malcolm X thirty-eight.  In their company, Clay’s notorious braggadocio comes across as a flamboyant, engaging callowness.  Just because he shoots his mouth off doesn’t mean he’s not somewhat in awe of his elders.

Eli Goree is physically convincing.  Without attempting a straightforward impersonation, he often captures Muhammad Ali’s pitch and speech rhythms.  Leslie Odom Jr impressed in his supporting role in Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet (2019), though the film as a whole was ropy.  Odom is very fine as Sam Cooke, whether speaking or singing:  he gives Cooke an unsettling mixture of assurance and disquiet.  Aldis Hodge steps up several notches from Clemency (also 2019) even if the character of Jim Brown, as written, seems the least developed.  Brown spends a lot of time listening to his companions.  (I don’t if the fact that Jim Brown, unlike the other three, is still alive is part of the explanation.)

And how is Marcus?   I’m unlikely, given the start of this note, to say no good, and I don’t need to:  it’s a pleasure to see what Kingsley Ben-Adir achieves here.  He seems quite young for the role but this has poignancy, given how short Malcolm X’s life was (Sam Cooke’s was even shorter).  Ben-Adir gives Malcolm an elegance and a barely suppressed sense of his own intellectual superiority.  (It occurred to me a couple of times this actor would also be a plausible Barack Obama; I discovered after watching One Night in Miami that he played Obama in the recent US TV mini-series The Comey Rule.)  The earnest Malcolm wants to relax – to reassure the others and himself that he’s on their wavelength.  There are inevitable limits to his camaraderie, thanks to who he is, and what he believes.  (Sam Cooke tells Malcolm he ‘used to be so much more’ than his now dominant public persona.)  On the television screen at the start, Ben-Adir cuts a less charismatically angry figure than the actual Malcolm X but the anger that comes through in the hotel room feels perfectly pitched.

Regina King and Kent Powers close the film with four sections to correspond with the introductory ones.  These postscripts are much more incisive, and a refreshing variation on the chunks of what-happened-next text that usually appear on the screen at the end of biographical films.  Jim Brown is shown in Hollywood, Muhammad Ali at the ceremony of his formal admission to the Nation of Islam.  But it’s the Sam Cooke and Malcolm X scenes that register most strongly (and not just because both were dead a year later).  In the hotel room, Malcolm, to shame Cooke, puts on a record of Bob Dylan singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.  How is it, Malcolm asks, that a white boy from Minnesota is creating protest songs while Sam Cooke is ingratiating himself with the status quo?  We last see Cooke as a guest on Johnny Carson’s TV show where he performs, as if in answer to Malcolm, his ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, which resonated so powerfully with the1960s Civil Rights movement (and in fact featured on an album released by Cooke in the same month that Clay won the world title).   As for Malcolm, we see him, his wife and their young daughters in fleeing, in their nightclothes, from their home which has been set on fire.  Pausing to look back at the blaze, there’s an extraordinary look on Kingsley Ben-Adir’s face:  Malcolm’s expression is fearful yet vindicated.

Two years ago, Regina King gave a good performance in a mediocre film, Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk.  She was rewarded with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and plenty of other prizes.  I thought those plaudits undeserved.  Behind a movie camera for the first time, King has now done an admirable job with exciting but challenging material.  She fully merits the praise that looks to be coming her way for One Night in Miami.

12 October 2020

[1] This is the first time on this website that I’ve applied the initial capital letter mid-sentence.  I’ve some difficulty with the mono-cultural implication of this but I don’t want to be contrary.  I don’t plan to make post hoc amendments to notes predating this one.

[2] According to Wikipedia, Malcolm X publicly broke from the Nation of Islam on 8 March 1964 (and went on to found Muslim Mosque Inc).  Two days previously, Elijah Muhammad announced in a radio address that Cassius Clay, initially refused entry to the movement because he was a boxer, would be joining the Nation of Islam and renamed Muhammad Ali.