The night Malcolm X, Cassisus Clay, Sam Cooke changed black America

Malcom X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) takes a photo of Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), who has his hand on the shoulder of Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) ,and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jnr), holding up a glass, in One Night in Miami ...

“This is one strange f..king night.” That’s the assessment of American football great Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and at the time he makes it, the night in question, February 25, 1964, is still young. What is to come, that night and beyond, is even stranger.

Brown, who retired from football to become a movie star (The Dirty Dozen, Ice Station Zebra, 100 Rifles), is the only one of the four men at the centre of One Night in Miami ... who is still alive, aged 84.

The other three, African American activist Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), soul singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jnr) and boxer Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), have all gone, the first two not long after that night in Florida’s most famous city.

This intelligent, humorous, stirring movie is the feature debut of actor Regina King, who won as Academy Award for her role as the mother, Sharon Rivers, in Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), based on the novel by James Baldwin.

One Night in Miami ... had its premiere at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, the first time a movie directed by an African American woman had been selected for that festival. The script is by Kemp Powers, an adaptation of his one-act play that was first staged in 2013.

It’s tricky bringing a dialogue-heavy play to the screen. On stage, we tend to expect the characters to know what to say and when to say it. In a film drama we might expect their conversations to be less theatrical.

I think Kemp and the director pull it off, helped by the fact that we all know Malcolm X and Clay had the gift of the gab.

So when the boxer deadpans with perfect timing, “Being a Muslim sounded a much better idea before tonight”, we believe it.

I also want to believe that when the puppyish pugilist is bouncing on the hotel room bed, the football star said, “What are you? A giant f..king baby?” And that when Malcolm X was talking about the pressures of work, the football star said, “You don’t have a job, Negro!”

This film is a fictional account of a real night. That day, February 25, 1964, was when the huge underdog Clay, “210-and-a-half pounds of trouble’’, as he described himself, defeated Sonny Liston to become the new heavyweight champion of the world.

That night, Clay and his friends Malcolm X, Cooke and Brown convened at Hampton House, a motel that welcomed African Americans.

For Malcolm X, the night was about Cassius Clay deciding he would join the Nation of Islam, or some version of it. Jim Brown and Cooke thought it was about having a party, ideally involving booze and women.

With Nation of Islam heavies guarding the door, the party was a bit of a fizzer. The motel fridge bar is full of vanilla ice cream. The film imagines what the four men talked about in that room on that night.

The director opens, however, with some backstory that would be difficult to do on stage. We meet each of the four men.

First we see Clay fighting British heavyweight boxer Henry Cooper at London’s Wembley Stadium in June 1963. He ended up winning the fight, but his cockiness almost brought him undone in the fourth round.

The boxing scenes, including the one with Liston, are convincing, with aerial shots well used. Goree, a Canadian actor best known as Quincy in the TV series Ballers, certainly looks the part.

Next we see Cooke singing to the whites-only audience at New York City’s Copacabana nightclub. The gig does not go well. Then there’s Brown visiting his white neighbour, Mr Carlton (Beau Bridges), on Saint Simons Island of the coast of Georgia.

Mr Carlton seems to like the running back considered one of the greatest American footballers. Yet when Brown offers to help him move some furniture inside the house, Mr Carlton’s response is devastating.

Finally we see Malcolm X returning home, after a television broadcast, to his wife and two daughters. He has two worries: he has fallen out with the leaders of the Nation of Islam and thinks “white devils”, as he calls them, are out to assassinate him.

This set-up exposes the world in which the four black men live. It is 1963 in the racially segregated United States. Six months before this night in Miami, Martin Luther King Jnr made his “I had a dream” speech in Washington DC.

“1963 is not an end, but a beginning,’’ he said.

Indeed. Six months later, Brown and Clay may be sports stars but that doesn’t mean they can just walk into a white person’s house. Cooke may sing songs that white people like, but that doesn’t mean they will tolerate him trying to talk to them from the stage.

There’s a compelling moment when, after passionately defending his money-making musical decisions, he talks, with a bit of self-recognising regret, about Blowin’ in the Wind, a protest song by a “white boy from Minnesota”.

Indeed it’s interesting as this film progresses that Cooke, not Clay, becomes the central character. All four actors are superb, but Odom, who won a Tony for his role in the stage musical Hamilton, is the one who comes to represent what this film is all about.

Malcolm X wants to change the world they are in and he wants his famous friends not just to help, but to become “weapons”.

“This movement we are in is called a struggle because we are fighting for our lives,’’ he tells them. “There is no room for anyone to be standing on the fence any more.”

It is he and Cooke who have the heated clashes. He tells the singer he could be the “loudest voice of us all”, rather than what he is now, the “monkey dancing to an organ grinder”.

Yet Malcolm X, too, is called out for his own flaws. Ben Adir, a British actor who played Barrack Obama in the TV mini-series The Comey Rule, captures the uncertain certainty that runs through Malcolm X.

One of the captivating elements of this 110-minute movie is its one-night setting. We see the men as they were then and only then.

Clay was the youngest, 22, and while he was the new heavyweight champion he was not the legend we know as Muhammad Ali.

(There is a wry moment where he dismisses the idea of a rematch with Liston because “he’s still in hospital”.

He did not know this at the time, but we do: the rematch did happen, in May 1965, and he, under his new name, knocked out Liston in the first round).

Cooke was 33 and what would happen to him later that year, which we do not see, has yet to be fully explained. His final scene, where he sings on the Johnny Carson show, is sadly spellbinding. We know, too, what happened to Malcolm X in New York City, a few days short of 12 months later.

That we do know what will become of the four men, all now legends of Black America, adds depth and power to the story. One Night in Miami ... is a movie with Oscar buzz about it, and deservedly so.