ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI: Bringing Larger-than-life Characters Down to Earth
Amazon StudiosIf activists and entertainers like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke could be considered real-life superheroes, then one might assume that a movie featuring a cross-over of sorts between them might hew close to the model of an Avengers or Justice League film. That is: epic. And yet, the Regina King-directed One Night in Miami, which features these four larger-than-life figures, does the opposite. The film, based on the play by Kemp Powers, takes a more stripped-down approach and consequently feels much more like a fly-on-the-wall type experience than most other films which tackle real-life people with as monumental an impact as these four. Powers and King are able to accomplish this by abandoning the biopic format, crafting compelling characters with flaws, and allowing these figures to interact with one another.
Powers dodges a potentially fatal bullet by ignoring the rules of a biopic. Most films that portray historical figures choose to attempt to tell an entire life story within the span of two hours. And more often than not, such an attempt proves futile. Condensing an entire lifetime into a time frame this short inevitably leads to oversimplifications. Instead of reflecting certainly more interesting real-life events, characters and plot points are broadened and figures from one film, who had nothing to do with figures from another, meld together.
Take the example of the recent biopics Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman. Both are based on real-life gay rock stars who had drug problems at one point or another. But other than those surface-level similarities, Freddie Mercury and Elton John were very different people. The films make no such distinctions. They are practically the same film, although one admittedly has slightly more flair. Both characters experience the same plot beats and go through the same conflicts. The films are so indistinguishable, it can at times be hard to remember which characters were from which films (it doesn’t help that Dexter Fletcher, the co-director of Rhapsody, directed Rocketman).
It seems Fletcher learned no lessons from the musical biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a movie that satirises and utterly demolishes every cliché in the book. As a rule of thumb, specificity and detail is almost always better than broadness, but it’s hard to achieve that when forced to tell an entire life story.
Not only is One Night in Miami not a biopic, but it exists at practically the other end of the spectrum: besides a few introductory scenes, the film takes place over the course of one night, and most of it within one hotel room. This narrow focus allows the dialogue, and consequently the characters, to take center stage. Even the best films focusing on historical figures, like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, contain their fair share of grandstanding and lionisation. Of course, that style can have merit, and it makes the films feel epic. But it also creates distance between the audience and the real-life person depicted on-screen. They very often feel like super heroic figures, larger-than-life characters who loom over their movies. This feeling is usually underlined by a combination of grand music and worm’s-eye view shots.
By very stark contrast, One Night in Miami’s characters are so down-to-earth it feels like they are fictional. Each person has a well-defined character arc, and they have very relatable flaws. While the meeting between X (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir), Ali (then known as Cassius Clay and brought to life by Eli Goree), Brown (Aldis Hodge), and Cooke (Leslie Odom, Jr.) actually did take place in real-life, the dialogue is, of course, fictionalised. This is true for most biopics. With the exceptions of major speeches or events, there are rarely word-for-word recordings of famous figure’s daily dialogue.
Other biopics don’t take advantage of the incredible opportunity available to them to create compelling character arcs. Battling a drug addiction, while unfortunately all too common and heart-breaking in the real world, becomes a tired dramatic trope when used over and over again as the primary conflict in many a biopic. There is none of that to be found in One Night in Miami.
Instead, there are very clear arcs for each character. X pursues the idea of leaving the Nation of Islam in order to form his own organisation that adheres more strictly to the moral values of his religion; Cooke starts the film intent on making his music commercially successful, and he ends it by singing “A Change Is Gonna Come”; Clay grapples with his decision to join the Nation of Islam; and Brown, with admittedly the weakest arc but portrayed by one of the strongest actors of the bunch, debates whether or not he should leave football to start a career in acting. Remarkably, Powers is still able to adhere to the general facts because each of the major events these characters wrestle over actually happened. The night is set up as a catalyst for the rest of their lives, and in that sense, while this may not have – in reality – been the conversation that led these men down their respective paths, they did still go down those paths at one point. Powers’ imagined motivations are made all the more compelling to watch because of how the characters interact with one another.
It really does feel like a superhero team-up akin to Avengers: Endgame. The only difference is, instead of bashing up hordes of CGI creatures, these superheroes spar with their words. The central debate of the film between X and Cooke over the type of music the latter makes and the activism he supposedly doesn’t do enough of would be engaging enough on paper. Yet it comes to vivid life on the screen when channeled through the top-tier thespianism of Ben-Adir and Odom, Jr.
In their noble but feckless attempts to accurately portray history, even though they usually end up with more fiction than fact anyways, Hollywood has mostly stayed away from imagined meetings among superstars. That untapped potential is finally realised with Powers’ astute – and still historically faithful – script. To put the effect into oversimplified terms: in other biopic-like films, the great figures at the films’ centres are always distinguished from the “mortal” people who populate the rest of the film. But in one room in Miami, the greats talk amongst each other and thus feel more like “mortals.” It doesn’t hurt that the four men in One Night in Miami were friends in real-life and have a more relaxed, easy candor about their conversation. Audiences get a chance to watch these four great men interact with their guard down, and it’s nothing short of illuminating.
Up until this film, it seems like Hollywood’s superhero craze has rubbed off on biopics. Studios have tried to turn real-life heroes into fictional superheroes, and the results have been movies about real people that don’t feel very real at all. The “go big or go home” mentality might work for the latest Marvel spectacle, but the formula doesn’t quite translate to character studies. With One Night in Miami, Kemp Powers and Regina King broke the mold and finally brought larger-than-life characters down to earth.
