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.

Oscar winning actress Regina King makes her directorial debut in One Night in Miami.

Adapted from a stage play. It imagines a meeting in a hotel after Cassius Clay's (Eli Goree) defeat of Sonny Liston in 1964 when he was crowned world heavyweight champion.

Clay and his friends Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr) and Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) get together to celebrate, joke, argue and debate about being black in 1960s America.

The pre credit sequence concentrates on each of these men. It shows the causal and non casual racism some of them encounter.

The crux of the movie is Clay deciding to become a Muslim and join the Nation of Islam which also entails changing his name.

Meanwhile Malcolm X is considering his future with the Nation of Islam which is causing tensions within the group.

Jim Brown wants to leave football and become an actor. It is better for his knees.

Cooke has realised that there is money to be made if white groups such as The Rolling Stones have big hits with the songs he has written.

Malcolm X though is angry with Cooke for not taking a strong political stance. He reminds Cooke that black people are being killed everyday. Others tell Malcolm that he is being too hard on Cooke.

Deep down this is a political movie, chiming with the Black Lives Matter debate.

The stagebound nature of this movie is hard to ignore. It also takes a while to get going but becomes compelling when Malcolm X and Sam Cooke clash.

The ensemble cast do bounce off well from each other. The best performance for me was by Leslie Odom Jr, especially his singing voice.

It has to be noted that within a year after this fictionalised meeting that both Malcolm X and Sam Cooke would be dead.

Overall, I think this was a very fine film. Affecting, intelligent. And a great "meeting of the minds" what-if scenario. Some things were better than others. The actor who played Ali nailed a young version of The Greatest. The Malcolm X character was played with some of the real Malcom's fervor and zeal. But having read Malcom X's biography, I find the real Malcolm was stronger and, at times, more severe than he was played here. I understand though the film wanted to capture more of his humanity and vulnerability, which I could appreciate. The boxing scenes didn't look like anything like the way the real Ali fought and were a bit flat. And it took quite a while for the film to get going. But once it does... once it brings these four great men together, it's very good.

Set against the 1960s and Ali's victory, four influential Black men meet in a motel room and talk about the role of civil rights, their responsibility of influence, how to fight, how to win, what does power mean. How all four men wielded their power different and the 'right way'

The conversation between Sam and 'Clay' in the car got me. The conversation of power to exist without constraint. Got me. 65 years and what these men dream haven't been fully realized.

'We aren't weapons' And the gut punch on the porch took my breath And Odon's voice

7.5 It was limited as a film as it was play first and seemed like Ma Rainey to have existed best like that. Still excellent but doesn't transfer seemlessly.

I think there is some fantastic acting in this. Especially Kingsley Ben-Adir and Leslie Odom Jr. Now, this also marks Regina King's directorial debut. I dont think she did a bad job, but I dont think she did the best job of transforming this medium. The movie is based on a play and let me tell you, it very often feels like you're watching a play and not a movie.

This is very much an actor's film. You'll watch and enjoy for the performances. But I didnt find anything else about the film stood out to me in any way.