Looking for a way to tell the black community without slipping into cliché and didactic rhetoric is one of the greatest challenges that filmmakers have tried to meet in the last year and a half, and that is why it makes a certain impression to note that one of those who has managed to hit the target more than others is not a professional director. She is Regina King, winner of the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2019 for the film If Beale Street Could Talk and star of the HBO series Watchmen, in his first rehearsal behind the camera with a strong and powerful film, based on a play by Kemp Powers staged in 2013: is called That night in Miami … (One Night in Miami…), is available on Amazon Prime Video and tells the night in which four black characters from America of the sixties tell each other without filters, focusing on issues that still continue to fuel discussions and perplexity.
They are Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown e Sam Cooke, four friends who really spend the evening of 25 February 1964 together: a few hours earlier Clay (Eli Goree), the 22-year-old who would soon go down in history as Muhammad Ali, became world heavyweight champion by knocking out Sonny Liston, however, due to racial segregation in force in the United States in those years, he was not allowed to celebrate the victory in public, but only privately. Here he is, then, spending the night of triumph in a room at the Hampton House Motel in Miami with his closest friends: the activist Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), practicing Muslim who explains that blacks should unite to face the white enemy, the world-renowned singer and record producer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and the football champion as well as film actor such as The dirty dozen e Mars Attack! Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge).
From here the fantasy of the writer Powers runs fast: what did the four friends have been talking about all evening? What themes will they have focused their attention on? According to the playwright, it is quite likely that they have discussed highly topical issues such as their role of responsibility within the community. Could the fact of being privileged and having achieved a social and economic status of a certain importance have somehow influenced their life, fueled by the dream of revenge and redemption? The most uncomfortable voice, in this sense, is represented by Malcolm X, who teases his friends, especially Sam Cooke, to passively accept the line of demarcation that whites draw towards blacks. The debate, however, takes on more interesting nuances when decidedly unconventional objections begin to arrive, such as the fact that the African American community treats blacks with lighter skin and blacks with darker skin differently. The result is a complex, multifaceted work that sees Regina King – who had already directed some episodes of the series The Finest – equipped with the right depth to make the dialogues and the succession of scenes even more vibrant and pressing. The Oscar nominations will be announced on March 15, but for the American press it is clear that That night in Miami …, as well as another movie with a very similar setting, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom of Netflix, will not fail to take home at least five nominations.
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