One Night in Miami, based on the play by Kemp Powers and directed by the great Regina King, did not at first strike me as sanitized and a little boring. The movie seemed like an interesting, fresh meditation on Black celebrity and masculinity, some jaw-dropping one-liners at the end of flashbacks–the Jim Brown and Cooke scenes in particular spring to mind–and overall a fun time watching Muhammad Ali act like a sixteen year old in the body of a twenty five year old as played by a thirty year old. It sounds like for people in the know–and now I’m leaning heavily on Wife’s investigation of Sam Cooke afficiandos from Jack Hamilton’s Slate article–this movie was a little bit annoying.
Hamilton, author with some expertise on Cooke, who wrote a book critiquing some of the assumptions made about his work in Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, makes the point that the way in which the movie’s climactic argument plays out is pretty nonsensical, requires Sam Cooke to be very sensitive about some of his hits from a decade prior, and elides his transformation as a performer for the sake of the story. That’s nothing to say of the very unusual circumstances that surround his death: the woman who appears to be a newly reconnected girlfriend complaining about the white hotel they’re staying in is possibly the mother of some of his children (??), and Cooke is about to be murdered under some fairly salacious circumstances. Jim Brown is also not asked to account for the violence in his past that might have undercut his role as the strong but silent type. Malcolm X’s childhood and his stint in prison are not relevant in arguments about his classism. Ultimately, these four men are smoothed out to such an extent that they need only discuss the high-minded intricacies of racial politics without getting into the weeds about their messy personal lives.
Thinking about the way that Cooke’s musical transformation in the movie missed the point was a real sucker punch and I think made me weary of recommending this to anyone who wasn’t already on board for seeing Leslie Odom Jr do a musical impression, but at the same time the quality of even a bad Amazon movie has been so much more consistently good than anything else on other streaming services I wonder if this isn’t a net positive for the world.
