Patti Perret/Amazon Studios
MOVIE REVIEW
One Night in Miami . . . (2020)
As a set-up, it’s almost too good to be true: After Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) won the heavyweight boxing title over Sonny Liston in Miami in February 1964, his afterparty was with singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), American football superstar Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and revolutionary Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir). The movie is an almost-real-time exploration of an hour they (may or may not have) spent together in Malcolm’s hotel room before going out to the diner where the well-known picture of the four of them was taken. The screenplay is very obviously based on a stage play (both by Kemp Powers), but director Regina King uses her camera and the space available to show us an entire world.