One Night in Miami... (2020)

I like Regina King, but One Night in Miami... is a boring, talky, plotless mess of a film. Kingsley Ben-Adir is excellent as Malcolm X – actually everyone is technically good in this movie, but Kemp Powers' screenplay is an utter disaster. There is literally no plot. This, to be fair, isn't a problem for a different kind of film. But One Night in Miami... is a character study without any study. It puts four famous men in an unattractive hotel room to talk about (Kemp Powers' ideas about) Blackness and the United States and the future. It's a film with characters but no plot. This film never stop feeling like it's a play. And if it were a play – and it was one – I'd say that it's not theatrical; it's just a bunch of talk. I don't like plays like this. They lack dynamism to me. They're more interested in their writers' ideas about some topic or other than they are in entertaining their audience or doing something cool with the medium.

Worse yet, One Night in Miami... insists on treating Malcolm X and Sam Cooke with the writer's own pop psychology. Malcolm's only doing what he's doing because he's trying to prove something to Black folks, it is posited. And Sam Cooke is only what he's doing because he's too invested white people's approval. This seems... lacking in nuance, let's say. But the film doesn't leave space for things to get richer. Characters are given space to air their opinions, but we never really get anywhere. All four of the characters, as it turns out, are right (except for Jim Brown, who appears not to have many opinions). It's just such a frustrating bit of writing. And I am not sure I understand, either, what the point of it all is. One Night in Miami... feels designed to confirm the viewer in our own ideas rather than to challenge them at all. It doesn't ask us to change; strangely enough, this film asks its characters to change. And this seems to me like an odd request.

The costumes are good, and I expect Leslie Odom Jr., who plays Sam Cooke, to get an Oscar nomination, but I wouldn't recommend it.