One of the best movies I saw over the holiday break was Regina King's directorial debut One Night in Miami..., and Amazon has just released a new trailer for the powerful drama as well as a quartet of character posters.
Set over the course of one fictional night in 1964, the film follows four formidable Black icons -- Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) -- as they meet in a Miami hotel room to discuss race, religion, and their personal responsibility to the civil rights movement as well as their own relationships to the cultural upheaval of the '60s.
One Night in Miami... is based on the stage play of the same name by Kemp Powers, who also wrote the screenplay. I watched it just a few hours after Pixar's Soul, which was co-written by Powers, who is clearly a screenwriting force to be reckoned with. King does an excellent job with the material, and the film actually gets better as it goes along and the interpersonal conflict between these four friends intensifies.
The cast is uniformly excellent, with Goree and Odom Jr. being the standouts in my book. Though Hodge's take on Jim Brown was the only one of the four that truly felt like a supporting performance, all four actors will compete in the Supporting Actor category at the Golden Globes according to a new ruling from the HFPA. Amazon had initially submitted Goree and Ben-Adir as the film's leads, but the HFPA ruled that all four would be given the same status, leaving it up to Amazon to decide whether to campaign them as leads, or as supporting actors. I don't really know how supporting makes any sense, since they aren't supporting anyone but themselves, but if Goree and Odom Jr. are more likely to be nominated in that category then I'll take it.
And yet... I didn't love the first trailer Amazon released. I very nearly reached out to one of the film's producers with a suggestion to cut a new trailer around Cooke's climactic concert and the sound of its audience participation, but lo and behold, Amazon has started the new year by reading my mind and doing just that. I might've been a little more bombastic, as opposed to the relative restraint and subtlety of this classy trailer, but props to the streamer for improving on its initial marketing effort.
Watch the new trailer below, and let me know how you think it stacks up to the old trailer. And be sure to watch One Night in Miami... when it debuts in select U.S. theaters on Jan. 8 before hitting Prime Video on Jan. 15.
