One Night in Miami

[Ezee E]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/87/One_Night_in_Miami_poster.jpeg

WIKI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Night_in_Miami_(film))

[Ezee E]

An acting ensemble that takes way too long to get to the "acting moments," One Night in Miami would certainly be something to see on stage, and in this case, just something better fit for stage. Comparing it to another stage play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, there's clearly a difference in direction. I don't know that Regina ever makes this cast seem like the "larger than life" personalities that they were.

Leslie Odom and Kingsley Ben-Adir are the ones that stand out the most, with Kingsley's Malcolm X having the meatiest dialog of the bunch.

[Stay Puft]

I wasn't familiar with Kemp Powers or this play beforehand, so unlike with Ma Rainey's, I didn't have any footing here; but I gather it's mostly similar to the play with the exception of that opening/closing salvo, which I appreciate in theory for its parallelism, but like E says, wow it takes forever to get going. The ending is at least succinct, but the opening just crawls to its title card drop, and it's all information that's just going to get repeated anyways. It's unnecessary, but once the "action" is underway I did like this quite a bit. It's largely a dramatization of rhetorical arguments, and each character functions primarily to represent a different perspective/position in the civil rights discourse, but the writing and performances are vivid enough to make it lively and engrossing. This is most obvious with the arguments between Sam Cooke and Malcolm X (Cooke's famous song had already been recorded and released by that point), but that also highlights the point of the exercise. It's not about portraying historical characters or their possible conversations (though again it does that effectively; I was blown away when I realized that was Leslie Odom Jr's actual singing voice, like damn!) but interrogating real conversations that are happening right now. The conceptual work of recreating "history" creates a tension on the one hand with how little that conversation has changed over the years, but I think it's also hopeful on another in the sense that these "characters" are not categorically history but real people whose work still shapes these dialogues, whose ideas still live and breathe and inspire (the fight continues, change is going to come, etc.). Just based on this I do think Ma Rainey's is a better play, but as "filmed plays" I enjoyed both.

[Grouchy]

I liked this a lot more than Ma Rainey's, although (again) I'm not sure the merit rests so much with the original play as with the way the adaptation flows on screen.

It's an entirely different film aside from the superficial coincidences. And although it's the kind of drama where one can see the seams in the plot, that's not necessarily bad here. After all, it's a dramatization of the stuff four legends might have said to one another, symbolizing their varied and common experiences being black in the US. My dislike for religious leaders made me almost clap every time Sam Cooke landed a blow on Malcolm X.