Elaine Chung
The scenario—four Black legends from the worlds of music, sports, and politics, all gathered at the height of the Civil Rights struggle—seems almost too cinematic to be true. And while
One Night in Miami, the Oscar buzz-generating new film directed by Academy Award- and Emmy-winning
If Beale Street Could Talk and
Watchmen star Regina King, is fictionalized, the broader strokes are true. In 1964, friends Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) all spent an evening together in a Miami hotel in a once-in-a-lifetime meeting of legends.