31/07/2024
In 1964, after Muhammad Ali's historic win over Sonny Liston, the boxing champ, along with Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, and Malcolm X, decided to skip the wild party in favor of a private gathering. While the details of their night are scarce, we know that they consumed copious amounts of ice cream and discussed matters of religion, politics, and race.
The meeting remained a secret until the 2013 play and 2020 film adaptation, "One Night in Miami," which brought the event to light. The quartet's fateful meeting inspired Kemp Powers to write the play, who was already a successful journalist and editor in Los Angeles. The night marks a significant moment in history.
Movie Plot: Four icons of their time - Malcolm X, and others walk into a hotel room in Florida in 1964. What follows is a riveting conversation about the civil rights struggle, the pitfalls of fame, and the power of activism. Regina King's directorial debut, "One Night in Miami," adapted from the play by Kemp Powers, brings these larger-than-life figures to the screen with knockout performances from Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, and Leslie Odom Jr.
As they discuss weighty issues of race, power, and responsibility, they also manage to find humor in their differences, joking about the prospect of giving up pork chops and drinking to convert to Islam. With stunning accuracy in the renditions of Cooke's songs and Ali's physicality and poetry, this movie delivers a concentrated taste of a culture war that never ends.
