One Night in Miami feels like required reading in a high school class. The film—which Kemp Powers adapted from his own stage play—has a bright premise: a hangout movie featuring Sam Cooke, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Jim Brown, bouncing their philosophies off one another in a hotel room during a crucial juncture of the Civil Rights Era, in February 1964.
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the late John Lewis are left out of the picture, as is any mention of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was covered in Ava DuVernay’s Selma. The film never questions Malcolm X’s radicalism, even if it is wary of corrupt elements within the Nation of Islam. The conflict is: to what degree should the others hitch themselves to it—how much truth can their white fans handle before it damages the celebrities’ careers?
Coming at a time when cultural assumptions are changing rapidly, when principles and objectives in the fight for social justice are often obscured by academic buzzwords, I wish that the movie was more explicit about what Malcolm X stood for, beyond a generalized distrust of white people. I found the film’s interpretation of his character as an anxious, socially awkward nerd among self-possessed showmen and athletes astute and dramatically satisfying. Kingsley Ben-Adir gives a genuinely witty performance—equal parts upright and uptight, righteous but no stranger to doubt. But although he calls himself an agitator, the audience is primed to like him for being an uncompromising idealist, even as the film does not give us enough detail to totally understand or evaluate his broader social vision.
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