"One Night in Miami," Regina King's stunning directorial debut, makes icons human - Salon

In "One Night in Miami," director Regina King imagined version of the February 25, 1964 encounter between four icons, Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) and soul legend Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) head out to a local liquor store to grab a bottle.

Because can't nobody else understand what it's like being one of us," Clay says, "You know: Young, Black, righteous, famous, unapologetic.".

Scenes and moments like these make it easy to understand why Regina King chose Kemp Powers' stage play as her directorial debut.

Here King lets narrative ingenuity permeate each frame as she remains behind the camera, drawing us inside this circle of legends, each of whom represents distinct aspects of Black identity and struggle.

"One Night in Miami" is expressly about these men, and it is not the first work about three out of four of them. But it may be the first one that lets us know them in ways previously not revealed both despite and because Kemp stakes his vision between entry and exit points that are confirmed history.

The story is based on the night following Clay's unexpected victory over reigning heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in February 1964, a bout that drew Brown, Cooke and Malcolm to Miami, Florida to cheer him on.

Simple though the setting may be, Reiker films the interior with a glow and the exterior with a buoyancy to which the figures escape, as Clay and Cooke do, or regroup.

This is a film that's careful to point out that celebrity only liberates Black stars to a limited degree and, in some cases, makes the target on their backs even brighter.

This approach is most apparent in Goree's take on Clay and Ben-Adir's recreation of Malcolm, two figures played by two of the Hollywood's biggest Black stars.

Odom, however, steals the spotlight in a moment when it seems as if Malcolm is set on pounding him into the dirt.

When Malcolm follows up a blistering dismissal of his greatest hits by playing Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In the Wind" and asking him why a white man is writing lyrics that do a better job of speaking to Black folks than he does, Odom launches Cooke out of the chair where he's been taking it and turns it around: Why can't Malcolm respect his focus on business investment, ownership and expansion.

Conflict makes up only a small part of "One Night in Miami," yet another blessing King gives us in making this film.