Yahoo Movies Watchmen star Regina King's One Night in Miami is a must see – here's how to watch online
The premise of Regina King's feature directorial debut, One Night in Miami (which you can watch right now on Amazon Prime Video), seems too good to be true, but true it is and luckily for fans of King, it lives up to its heady promise. It takes place over, you guessed it, one night in 1964.
After underdog Cassius Clay, soon to be called Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree), defeats heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, he celebrates the event with three of his friends: Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge). What follows is a fictional account inspired by the historic night these formidable figures spent together, examining the struggles they faced and the vital role they played in the civil rights movement.
With such a heavy weight on its shoulders (see what we did there?), King's adaptation would need to not only succeed at telling the literal story of these four men but also break out of the constraints of the play upon which it's based. Like Netflix's latest adaptation of August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, One Night in Miami takes place ostensibly in one room.
Watch One Night in Miami on Prime Video
But King is clever enough not to let this constrain her too much (it helps that playwright Kemp Powers adapted it for King), and though we mostly experience the four main characters in this one night, we're also taken on preludes, flashbacks and brief journeys from the hotel room, which makes returning to it much like re-entering a boxing ring.
That these four men were friends is an oversimplification – they were foils for each other, for the good, the bad and everything in between. They challenged each other and in doing so, challenge the audience to examine what it means to be righteous in the face of injustice.
That its cast is superb is what stops One Night in Miami from feeling didactic. It is emblematic of the adage 'more than the sum of its parts', not because one would expect that on their own each character would be flat or boring, but rather because once they all come together the movie takes on another life, as if the foursome is another character altogether.
As each man tries to tease something out about the other, the audience is in the lucky position of being able to go on this journey with them. It is a true fly-on-the-wall viewing experience that makes its end, and each man's emotional arc, that much more poignant.
For anyone who has struggled with identity and responsibility, particularly within a marginalised group, it will strike at the heart of that internal debate – how does one be a good person, a responsible person, to their fellows? What does that even mean?
Each man has a different answer to this question, and throughout the film the viewer can't help but side with each as they explain why they've chosen the path they're on. But the movie never tells you who is right; a smart move, and the only one that perhaps makes sense given the complexity of the questions it's asking.
Instead, it lets the real people's lives – Ali, Cooke, Brown and Malcolm X – speak for themselves. And by doing so it allows us to have our own answers, too, for ourselves.
One Night in Miami may have a slow-ish start, but from the first gut punch (you'll know it when it happens) it never lets up. It is a must-watch — not only because it is Important with a capital I, but because it is a superbly acted and beautifully written story whose full emotional resonance settles in and stays, long after the credits roll.
One Night in Miami is available to watch now on Amazon Prime Video.
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