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Do you know the video in which Hitler and Stalin sing "Video Killed the Radio Star" together?
There is, on YouTube, but we can assume that despite deceptively real facial expressions and harmonious lip movements, it is an AI manipulation;
the two never sang a duet.
Or do you remember Friedrich Schiller's “Maria Stuart”, where the two queens, the Scottish and the English, speak out - which never happened?
And now this: four African American icons - boxer Cassius Clay, thought leader Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and footballer Jim Brown - are debating the issue of black emancipation in a hotel room.
The meeting might have happened, nobody knows the exact details - but now “One Night in Miami” is making a whole film out of it, plus a political, highly topical and Oscar-smelling film.
Regina King's film even dates the "meeting" to February 25, 1964, when Clay wrested the heavyweight title from previous champion Sonny Liston.
King turns a victory celebration into a historic turning point: the night when “Black Power” was created.
This is most likely fiction, but fiction that was in the air.
At that time, Sonny Liston was considered by many activists as "Uncle Tom-Negro" who still danced to the whistle of the white gentlemen.
Cassius Clay stood for a new (self-) awareness, he was, as he proclaimed it, "young, black, upright, famous, uncompromising".
Yes, and that's what “One Night in Miami” is all about, what can “Black Power” actually consist of?
Long Night: Malcolm X, Jim Brown, Cassius Clay and Sam Cooke (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, Aldis Hodge, Eli Goree and Leslie Odom jr., From left)
Source: Patti Perret / Amazon Studios
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Each of the four stands for a different approach.
Clay screams out his black pride.
Malcolm X calls for political awareness and does not rule out violence.
Cooke is committed to gaining economic influence.
Brown wants to use the rules of the system to his own advantage.
In a way, “One Night in Miami” is a didactic film, or rather, a reflective one.
Regina King and the playwright Kemp Powers, on whose play the film is based (and who also co-wrote Disney's “Soul”), let everyone present their arguments.
However, they also come to a head and deal with the contradictions.
Malcolm X, for example, theoretician of the militant “Nation of Islam” church, attacks Sam Cooke head-on, who sings soft soul in front of a white audience.
X puts on a record - Dylan's "Blowin 'in the Wind" - and asks challengingly why no black person writes such protest songs.
Cooke replies that the Rolling Stones paid him monthly royalties for the track It's All Over Now, and that he drives a Ferrari.
It's a different round of four, as if Marx, Keynes, Friedman and Schumpeter had met to discuss economics - four whites.
This hotel room in Miami is not a debating club, but a refuge for black men who argue, brag, celebrate, chill, and all in a room protected from the eyes of white America (and their wives).
Eli Goree as Cassius Clay
Source: Patti Perret / Amazon Studios
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Political correctness is now trying to dictate that only blacks write about blacks and only migrants are allowed to report about migration, which in itself is a racist approach - but one has to admit that a white director would not have gotten this familiarity with extended families and barbershop.
We see four individuals, each one full of faults and doubts, far from iconic worship.
And yet this quartet represents the complexity of a situation that half a century later has still not fundamentally changed.
Of course, “One Night in Miami” serves a higher purpose.
Such “impossible meetings” always have a meta level.
Maria Stuart embodies a self-determined life, in contrast to the externally determined Elisabeth.
In his piece “Travesties”, Tom Stoppard brings Lenin, James Joyce and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara together in Zurich, three symbols of revolutionary changes.
And Nicholas Roeg brings together Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, the footballer Joe DiMaggio and the communist hunter Joseph McCarthy for a reflection on the phenomenon of being famous in the film "Insignificance".
Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X
Source: Patti Perret / Amazon Studios
The meta-purpose of “One Night in Miami” is undoubtedly to help build a black identity.
In contrast to many identity apostles, however, the film does not claim that it knows exactly what this is;
he's too intelligent for that.
He allows many ways to get there, and if he is committed to something, it is to the realization that the struggle is not primarily a cultural one, but an economic one;
Awareness of identity is of little use as long as the power of money is a purely white power.
He proves his openness in the four protagonists, who all change profoundly that night: Cassius Clay will henceforth call himself Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X breaks with the Nation of Islam, Jim Brown begins a Hollywood career.
And Sam Cooke writes the song "A Change is Gonna Come," which will become a civil rights anthem.