One Night in Miami...

If you've ever read Jean-Paul Sartre's Huit clos/No Exit, this movie will look very familiar. It's the story of four men - four very famous men - who spend an evening in a motel room after one of them, Cassius Clay (soon to become Mohammed Ali), defeats Sonny Listen for the World Heavyweight Championship. As in Sartre's play, they rehash each other's past lives, rip each other and themselves apart, etc. The "only" difference is that, in order to turn the original play on which this is based into a movie, about half an hour of extraneous material is added at the beginning before the four get to the motel room.

The acting here is all first rate. I can't tell you how close the actors come to impersonating the originals, but that's irrelevant, because this is still basically a play "based on historical characters" and not a pseudo-documentary. (The meeting of the four never actually took place.) It is a discussion of each Black man's obligation to participate in some way in the Civil Rights movement delivered in dialogue form, as Plato did with his Dialogues over 2,000 years ago.

There are times when the discussions don't sound "natural" - whatever that means. (Almost none of No Exit sounds natural, except perhaps for a convention of philosophers.) How much that bothers you will vary with your tolerance for philosophy staged in theatrical form. My recommendation would be to skip the first 20 minutes or so of the movie and just get down to the motel scene.

If you have read a biography of Malcolm X, or seen Spike Lee's movie about him, certain parts of this movie dealing with him will be clearer, in particular his relationship with the Nation of Islam. The rest is pretty self-explanatory.