[One Night in Miami is incisive about the pressures of Black
celebrity, and its central dialogue circles the question of what its
characters—all icons in their own right—owe to both the Black
community at large and a nascent civil rights movement. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

CHORUS AND CATHARSIS: A BREAKDOWN OF ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI'S BEST SCENE
 
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Isaac Feldberg
January 15, 2021
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_ One Night in Miami is incisive about the pressures of Black
celebrity, and its central dialogue circles the question of what its
characters—all icons in their own right—owe to both the Black
community at large and a nascent civil rights movement. _

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Regina King’s electrifying _One Night in Miami_
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four Black American icons together under one roof. Then, it lets them
talk. Adapting Kemp Powers’ one-act play of the same name, this
fictional account of a real evening—February 25, 1964, the night a
young Cassius Clay (soon to rename himself Muhammad Ali) beat Sonny
Liston to become the world heavyweight boxing champ—imagines the
conversations that might have taken place after that bout.

Inside a motel room at the Hampton House, Clay (Eli Goree) celebrates
his win with friend Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), football star Jim
Brown (Aldis Hodge) and soul legend Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom, Jr.).
Allowing audiences to eavesdrop on this gathering (which did happen,
though little else about it is known), King’s fly-on-the-wall
approach and Powers’ incisive script give us something beyond
hagiography: A jaggedly passionate meeting of minds too agile,
empowered and ambitious not to see the bigger picture.

Lively, often volatile debates between the four—encompassing the
struggle for racial equality, the nature of Black celebrity and
brotherhood, and their differing routes to economic and political
prominence—dominate King’s film, transforming it into a spirited
dialectic of race, place, and nation. But _One Night in Miami_, for
all its bottled ideological tension, finds its most cinematically
potent moment away from the central motel rendezvous, in a
show-stopping sequence where Odom’s Cooke salvages a concert gone
awry by performing “Chain Gang” a capella—granting this
unapologetically talky picture a cathartic choral release.

Throughout the film, conflicts erupt between Malcolm and Cooke, one
calling for revolution against racist power structures while the other
works within them to his benefit, and the two progressively pull fewer
punches with one another. After a particularly brutal dressing-down by
Malcolm, aimed at Cooke’s perceived political silence and pandering
to white audiences, Cooke storms out, followed shortly by Clay. When
he returns to the room to gather his things, Malcolm (defused somewhat
by Brown) catches him again in conversation, revealing that he’s
actually attended five of Cooke’s shows—including that one in
Boston.

“Shit,” Cooke chuckles. “Boston?” Malcolm tells the
story—and King, after trading the hotel’s ambient noise for the
sounds of distant applause, drops us into the front row of Cooke’s
concert, as opener Jackie Wilson (Jeremy Pope) struts and preens to
“Lonely Teardrops,” working the crowd. “Not really my cup of
tea,” confides Malcolm, whom we glimpse at the back of the venue.
“Sam was getting ready to come on stage. Yeah, I knew he was about
to class this joint _up_.”

Though Malcolm’s narration sets the scene, King never relinquishes
her camera to his point of view. Capturing different angles from the
perspective of Black men and women on the concert floor, while also
including behind-the-curtain details—like Wilson snarking a
not-so-friendly “Don’t fuck up now” as he heads off stage—that
only Cooke could have known, she establishes that this memory,
regardless of who’s telling it, belongs to no one so much as
history.

Cooke takes the stage as King and editor Tariq Anwar cut back to the
motel, where Cooke has set down his guitar case to perch on one of the
beds. Malcolm recalls Cooke tenderly caressing the mic—“You know
how Sam does”—earning a laugh. Powers’ script glimmers here, as
the four separately picture it; teasingly, Malcolm suggests Cooke
admiring a rare gem, Clay compares it to a lover’s touch and Brown
brings up an NFL championship trophy. The tension has dissipated; for
a moment, we see Cooke’s face and realize just how keen he is to
relive this moment through Malcolm’s eyes.

Then, as Cooke sings the first notes of his biggest hit—the swooning
“You Send Me”—we hear the dissonant squawk of feedback, followed
by a pop. Malcolm draws a finger across his throat: “Sound went
out.” Clay gasps. Within seconds the crowd has rounded on Cooke. A
piece of popcorn pelts his shoulder; as he looks out, the crowd’s
vocal discontent quickly outweighs any residual cheering.

Faced with a busted sound system and an amped Boston crowd, his
backing musicians make a break for it. As Cooke dryly observes, “My
band was out of there like some runaway slaves.” Their haste, and
this wording, speak volumes: Unable to perform, Cooke and the other
players know how vulnerable they are—that their humanity will only
be validated so long as they give the people what they came for.

At the back of the venue, Malcolm’s mouth moves as he whispers in
voiceover, “This young brother is fittin’ to get himself
killed.” Without his mic, Cooke is disarmed, more imperiled by the
minute. For a beat, the filmmakers linger in the motel room; as Clay
presses Malcolm for more, he remembers with a smile,
“Something…something amazing happened.”

Striding forward, Cooke murmurs instructions to the front row, barely
audible beneath the heckling. Trouble brewing, Malcolm eyes the exit.
Cooke, meanwhile, begins moving to a rhythm only he can hear. _Ooh.
Ah! Ooh. Ah!_

King’s framing of Cooke in this sequence is openly reverential. From
the stage, he towers above the crowd; at the front, one young woman is
eye-level with his knees, watching intently as he brings one foot down
(_Ooh._) and swings his arms up (_Ah!_). Filmed from behind, Cooke
stands tall, one man before a swaying sea of bodies. His head is
slightly lowered; around it, the warmly diffuse spotlight suggests a
halo. This is no longer the chaos mounting a few moments ago. This is
church.

As Cooke grunts and stomps, the crowd’s jeers fade and they pick up
the chant. King and Anwar match this tempo, almost imperceptibly
speeding up their cuts. _Ooh._ On stage, Cooke’s eyes blaze; even
from the venue’s center, his conviction is palpable. _Ah!_ The
front row nods up at him, entranced. _Ooh._ We see one shoe clack
down against the floor. _Ah!_

Just for a breath, King and Anwar cut back to the motel. _Ooh._ All
four men sit close, attentive, two on each bed. Malcolm’s head sways
in time as he exhales, _“Ah!”_ More people in the crowd are
joining in. “All together, yeah!” Cooke croons in that honeyed
tenor, rolling his shoulders back. “Every-body!” More feet hit the
floor, louder. _Ooh._ Malcolm stops to look back and can see, from a
distance, Cooke stretching his hands wide. _Ah!_ This time, when one
shoe comes down, its sound deafens; off screen, hundreds are
amplifying the chant. Just like that, the entire room is in
rhythm. _Ooh!_ At the motel, everyone’s listening—especially
Cassius, who joins Malcolm on the explosive “Ah!”

Cooke launches into the opening verse of “Chain Gang” and this
collective chanting only swells. As Malcolm steps into the crowd,
squinting, he can see Cooke gesturing and swaying from the stage. That
silky-smooth voice has never sounded so immense, but by now he’s
harnessed the energy of the crowd, thousands lifting the irrepressible
melody of his anthem until the performance is theirs as well. That the
song in question is directly about prison labor, the violent
exploitation of Black bodies by a white carceral state, makes hearing
it amplified by an all-Black audience feel all the more seismic.
Meditating on just one tool of racist terror and control, “Chain
Gang” resonates in this setting as an expression of remembrance,
strength and solidarity.

The filmmakers know when not to cut away. Cooke’s rendition is a
stunner, and they afford him the full measure of his power. Kept out
of sight as King’s camera lingers in this perfect moment,
Malcolm’s awed voiceover concludes, “I saw him up there, covered
in sweat, and singing to them. But in the back, you couldn’t hear
anything except that chant. And you know what? That was good enough.
Yes, that was one hell of a show, Sam…”

The standout sequence in a film constructed of richly
thought-provoking conversations, this bit of miracle-working
musicality also deftly clarifies _One Night in Miami_’s vision of
the bond between Sam and Malcolm. Intense and acrimonious, often
explosively so, their dialogue is rooted in a deep mutual respect and
admiration—one Malcolm realizes too late in the evening he has
needed to reaffirm. Not simply leaders in their respective spheres but
preachers to overlapping nationwide congregations, these two men had
the potential to truly see and hear one another, perhaps better than
anyone. “Brother, you could move mountains without lifting a
finger,” Malcolm reminds Cooke. Driving their many confrontations
over the course of the night is Malcolm’s recognition of this gift.

_One Night in Miami_ is incisive about the pressures of Black
celebrity, and its central dialogue circles the question of what its
characters—all icons in their own right—owe to both the Black
community at large and a nascent civil rights movement. To what degree
should they champion causes greater than themselves? In times of
struggle, is doing so a moral imperative?

For Cooke, this line of questioning carries a particular sting, one
Malcolm is all too eager to agitate, calling him a “windup toy in a
music box” and frequently casting aspersions on Sam’s ability to
bridge the divide between Black and white music. At one point,
needling Cooke over what Malcolm perceives as political ambivalence in
his music, Malcolm puts on “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan,
going so far as to contend that one song—by “a white boy from
Minnesota,” he stresses—speaks more to the civil rights movement
than an entire catalog of Cooke’s romantic ballads. “It doesn’t
make you angry?” Malcolm taunts.

Though _One Night in Miami_ allows Malcolm that moment, his
criticism is not entirely fair. Holding the success of Dylan’s
protest anthem up against Cooke’s earlier assertion that “being
vocally in the struggle is bad for business,” Malcolm leaves
unacknowledged the harsh realities of a mainstream that only
acknowledged protest from select quarters—and accepted some visions
of Black artistry more readily than others. Ignoring both the
political fire of songs like “Chain Gang” and the strategy behind
Cooke’s music label, which produced mainly Black gospel singers,
Maclolm can’t admit that Cooke’s economic freedom affords him an
incredibly viable form of Black power.

The tragedy of _One Night in Miami_ lies in the unresolved conflict
between these two great men; it’s impossibly heightened by the
knowledge that neither had long left to live. By February of 1964, all
four of its central figures were at career crossroads, but these two
were approaching their ends. A year later, Malcolm X would be
assassinated in New York, amid escalating tensions between him and the
Nation of Islam. Cooke didn’t even live out the year: That December,
cut down in his prime, he was murdered at a seedy L.A. motel.

But _One Night in Miami_ balances its more incendiary and elegiac
discourses best through the raw emotional power of its soaring
“Chain Gang” climax. In one virtuoso sequence, _One Night in
Miami_ lets Malcolm lay bare the foundation of his friendship with
Cooke, permits the foursome a moment of breathless appreciation and,
in a moment of pure movie magic, shows its audience—more than words
ever could—the heart and soul of a legend.

_Isaac Feldberg is an entertainment journalist currently based in
Boston, who’s been writing professionally for seven years and hopes
to stay at it for a few years more. Frequently over-excited and
under-caffeinated, he sits down to surf the Criterion Channel but ends
up, inevitably, on Shudder. You can find him on Twitter
at @isaacfeldberg [[link removed]]._

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